Here in the ultra-dense Netherlands, threats to insects are magnified. As such, it's easier to point to specific causes.
Butterflies: 50% reduction in 50 years. Beetles: 75% decline since 1985. Ladybugs: 50% reduction in 20 years. Across the border in Germany: a 75% decline in flying insects since 1989.
It doesn't take much of a scientist to see the trend. I've been hiking the forests here multiple times per week for 20 years. You can clearly see how some groups are disappearing whilst others remain.
There's several root causes but the primary one is a lack of native plant diversity. Since agriculture over here is done in close proximity to forests, the soil becomes acid due to the nitrogen disposition. This benefits the growth of a handful of plants at the expense of all others. In some of our forests, the soil is now so acid that snails no longer develop a case and bird eggs collapse.
In this plant monoculture, insects depending on a specific host plant disappear. Outside (protected) forests, things aren't much better. Even the tiniest of strips of grass that would normally produce wildflowers, are aggressively mowed down. People's gardens are designed to be as hostile to insects as is possible.
Secondary reasons are invasive species and light pollution.
It's a sad state of affairs and one we should be deeply ashamed of. We're not talking about some iconic predator requiring hundreds of acres of wild forest just to survive. We're talking about insects that require little space, healthy soil, a flower, and for it to be left alone. We can't even offer that.
And what's crazy is that everyone thinks it's going to be electric cars that somehow saves us. When the fact of the matter is there is a ton of stuff we can start doing today that would positively impact the environment.
It's pretty easy:
* Restore lawn areas to native plants: small (wildflowers), medium (bushes), big (trees)
* For areas that are kept as lawn, simply mow less. Allow plants to flower. Don't treat clover as evil. Support multiple grass types. Stop using chemical fertilizers and stop trying to feed the grass. Feed the soil with organic fertilizers and compost.
That's it! It reduces maintenance costs and time, reduces the use of gasoline, reduces noise pollution, and vastly improves soil health, insect and wildlife health, and increases pollination of our own food. It's a literal win-win.
And yet, no one does it. They turn their lawns into wastelands and never even use them. I've heard that lawns should be compared to deserts but that even that is disregarding the biodiversity that deserts have over lawns.
I'm annoyed by the climate change (CO2) narrative. It is far too narrow. Rather we should be talking about an umbrella of unsustainability that includes wildlife decimation, biodiversity collapsing, pollution, overfishing, deforestation, water and air quality.
We shouldn't just live in a way that expels less CO2, we should live in a way that doesn't annihilate the biosphere.
And yes, gardens are a great personal way to make a start. Mine too has native flowers which attract lots of insects, in turn attracting birds and bats. Plus some mini ponds. It's far less work compared to a sterile garden whilst much more fun.
People do talk about all those things. There are plenty of groups dedicated to each of those things individually or which include all of those things in their mission statement.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where getting even the most basic policy changes to protect the environment is a herculean effort, so people rationally focus much of their attention on the largest or most urgent things.
If you had a friend who was playing with Uranium, smoking cigarettes and eating food with artificial colors, it'd be fair to say they should stop doing all of those things to avoid getting cancer. But it'd also be fair to focus mostly on the Uranium.
The people who talk about expelling less CO2 also talks about those other things.
It’s kind of amazing that in the broad spectrum of groups you could talk about that are having a negative effect on biodiversity, etc. anyone would mention climate change activists and groups when not only is their fight broadly related, they’re almost completely in alignment with more biodiversity.
This dynamic where such comments attack people who support the commenter’s stance but support it maybe 80% are attacked by the commenter, but the people who do not support their stance, are actually in power, and are going out of their way to destroy what the commenter claims to care about are not even mentioned is fascinating.
There is no salvation. Whatever was Earth before human civilization is in a death spiral. What comes next is anyone's guess. Elites are massing wealth to get off planet, and when the mass migrations really start and mid income countries start becoming failed states on their path, I hope you are in a place that can hold you safe for the remainder of your time here.
Well... no. They're prepping to move to compounds in New Zealand. Even a global warming (and nuclear war, let's throw that on the pile!) ravaged Earth is vastly easier to live on than, say, Mars. Trying to escape that way would be a frying-pan-into-the-fire plan.
> and when the mass migrations really start and mid income countries start becoming failed states on their path, I hope you are in a place that can hold you safe for the remainder of your time here.
But yeah, that's basically the reason why, I reckon. Somewhere sufficiently stable and liberal that's also really, really hard to reach without a ship or airplane. Avoiding the various climate refugee crises and wars we're likely to see in the coming decades probably is their motivation. New Zealand's a clear front-runner in that race.
The compounds in NZ, mountaintops, deserts, islands, they are the now. There is clearly a drive to get off planet. It will most likely fail but it's happening.
No, because there is literally no where to go. Mars is 100X harder to live in than Antarctica, which we still can't live without constant resupplies from developed areas of Earth. If those are gone, we can't live on Antarctica, let alone Mars or whatever (perhaps mythical) exoplanets we could only reach after hundreds or thousands of years on generation ships (which we also don't have the technology to make anytime soon)
If you watch high-altitude time-lapse photography, human settlements look exactly like a mold infestation. We spread as much as we can, and eventually we'll collapse as we exhaust resources.
The earth won't "care", it'll just be another of the many boom-bust cycles in the history of nature. We're part of it.
It's not going to be pleasant for the humans and animals that live through it, though!
While we have enough individual intelligence to see this is coming, and wish to avoid it, I don't think we collectively have the intelligence to do so. A crowd of humans has its own dynamics and kind of thought, and so far, these crowds are very short-sighted and prone to all sorts of irrationalities and hysterias.
These crowds are being controlled by those benefitting from the status quo and the status quo, practically by definition, has its own momentum - "this is the way we've always done it." Many people legitimately don't understand how doing what we did in the past won't work or even cause harm going forward. That's the heart of the issue.
I agree that it's a fantasy. For one, I think Mars is just a power play by the likes of people like Musk and Bezos. It doesn't even make sense to view Mars as a backup for Earth because, at least currently, Earth is still alive and Mars is already completely dead. It's like saying "we're going to kill off the only planet that can sustain us to get to a planet that cannot sustain us". It's mind boggling that we can get people excited about electric cars and Mars but cannot get those same people to realize the reality that Earth is the only planet known to mankind that can sustain us.
As far as I can tell, humans can't survive for extended periods of time in gravity as low as it is on Mars.
There's also the problem of surface radiation. Given that we can't figure out how to build subterranean cities at scale on earth, I'm not sure what the plan is for dealing with that.
Honestly, a self sustaining space station seems easier to achieve than a self sustaining Mars base:
You can spin the space station up to 1 G, park it behind a celestial body that acts as a radiation shield and power it with nuclear, or beamed solar power.
Maybe I'm missing something obvious about the relative difficulty of the two problems.
My general sentiment is that it seems much, much easier to just keep Earth sustainable rather than trying to make an unsustainable planet sustainable. It's sort of a paradox. If we can't keep a sustainable planet sustainable, how can we possibly make an unsustainable planet sustainable and keep it that way?
Because keeping the Earth sustainable means reaching consensus among 200 states and 8 billion people? That is a political/legal problem, and I am not sure why it should be "much, much easier" than first settlers terraforming an otherwise empty planet.
It seems wrong even to compare those two tasks. They are so different that they don't seem to have a common metric. An analogy: is is easier to stop two spouses from quarreling or to write a SHA-256 implementation from scratch? How would that even be measured?
At least writing a SHA-256 implementation from scratch is theoretically possible. The point is, it is possible to keep Earth habitable, were just not doing that. But there is no plan B. In other words, we're fucked.
> As far as I can tell, humans can't survive for extended periods of time in gravity as low as it is on Mars.
Our only datapoints for long-term human activity are "Earth gravity" and "complete freefall". This is one of the things I hope we can answer in the near-term with manned lunar missions.
> Given that we can't figure out how to build subterranean cities at scale on earth
We know perfectly well how to build subterranean cities at scale on Earth. We don't, because it's expensive and because people tend to like having windows for natural light and fresh air. It'd be cheaper on a smaller planet like Mars (less gravity to fight against), and it ain't like there'd be a possibility of natural light or fresh air anyway given the radiation and unbreathable atmosphere.
> Honestly, a self sustaining space station seems easier to achieve than a self sustaining Mars base
You'd have the same radiation problem if not worse (and no "underground" to shield you from it; "park it behind a celestial body" doesn't really work, either, when you have cosmic rays coming from all directions - said cosmic rays being the dominant form of space radiation), but other than that, yes, space stations are more practical - and you can build 'em anywhere, not just Mars.
You could also build such a spinning structure on an airless body like the Moon or Ceres. Ceres is in fact pretty close to ideal as far as human colonization goes: low gravity (so it's easy to build there and easy to leave for other destinations), close proximity to the rest of the asteroid belt (so lots of opportunities for space mining), and it's pretty much a giant ball of water ice and hydrocarbons so we'd have everything we need (at least on a fundamental chemical level) for air, food, and water alike.
Look I get it, dismissing part of my comment on technicalities makes it seem less likely to play out. But the fact remains that we are clearly headed for disaster and rich people are clearly hoarding as much money as they can to prepare. To hyper focus on tearing apart just one outlandish way in which the elites might or might not seek safety is its on form of denial.
I wouldn't get so annoyed by it. Nerds will nerd and pick apart trivialities. I get your point that the rich are planning for this. Whether they do it by building underground bunkers, space stations, or communities are mars is moot. I'll add though that I don't think it's worth concerning ourselves what the super rich are up to.
The rich killed Rome too and they still ended up with no society.
Bezos' space corporation, Blue Origin, hasn't yet reached the orbit - after 22 years of continuous work. So it seems safe to say that Bezos does not place much value on space colonization.
Musk, on the other hand, seems to be obsessed by the Mars project.
As long as the elites believe they have a plan B, whether it be New Zealand or Mars, they will not make the sacrifices necessary to avert disaster.
The author writes on his experience with a group of elites who were seeking ways to protect their positions in the face of collapse (societal / ecological / etc.). Salvation will not come from the top.
Nobody is making it off earth. And it's not just elites, we're all shitting in the drinking water to some degree, and we're all stuck here. I don't know anybody (personally) who actually makes significant lifestyle sacrifices that curb their impact on climate change. My wife and I are vegetarian, have no kids, don't own a car, and haven't been on a plane for years. I don't know any other person in the "first world" who lives the way we do. I'm not saying this because I think I'm better than other people or because I'm some type of activists. Far from it. Our lifestyle choice is comfortable physically and is the only one that makes me comfortable psychologically. I rarely mention this stuff online, and I never bring it up with friends of family. But every person I know in my age group lives a "typical Western life". Cars. Kids. Meat-rich diet. Several flights a year. Plastic bullshit on their lawn at Halloween and Christmas. And yet they also demand to know what the elites and politicians are doing to save the planet. Because they sure as shit don't think it's their job.
I'm not saying "this is your fault". But I think that these elites you want to blame are as clueless and selfish as every other person you know.
> And yet they also demand to know what the elites and politicians are doing to save the planet.
Because none of what they do as individuals has any significant bearing on the current trajectory of Earth's biosphere. None of it. These are systemic problems, and trying to pin the blame for systemic problems on individual participants in that system - as you're doing right now - is not just ineffective, but is deliberately ineffective: a narrative crafted by those very same elites (and the corporations they own) to deflect blame from the system they themselves architected and continue to enforce.
> I think that these elites you want to blame are as clueless and selfish as every other person you know.
Well yeah, obviously. But that brings into question why they're elites in the first place, and the answer is that they shouldn't be elites in the first place, not that they're somehow of equal blame (let alone less) as their subjects.
Vegan. Grow much of my own food (mill my own flour, etc.). I lived without electricity or running water for most of a decade '00s (and only added a small DC only solar system for electric lighting for the rest of that decade). I continue to maintain a small footprint, but electric lighting, refrigeration, heat in the winter and hot and cold running water are pretty great (hot and cold running water is fucking amazing!), and I don't want to give those up again. But, none of that matters as much as my being a US citizen. The US military has CO2 emissions larger than 140 countries combined. My share of those US military emissions made my carbon footprint very high throughout the 00's in spite of near zero personal emissions. Presently, the US pushing for sanctions on Russia, led to much higher carbon footprint LNG being shipped to Europe to replace Russian pipeline gas (US oligarchs are making a killing selling LNG, though). Etc.
If everyone, in the developed world, made similar personal choices, to the two of us, things would be better, but it would still be insignificant compared to US policy decisions like the massive US military perpetually deployed across the world. And, if the entire world's population was able to share in hot and cold running water, heat in the winter, electric lighting, refrigeration, etc., much of those gains from personal choices of westerners would be negated.
I don't know the answer. Yes, a lot of people need to reduce their waste, and share with the rest of humanity and non-human life. But, it will not be enough-- somehow we must change governmental and corporate policies.
As things currently stand, the average American has near zero impact on policy decisions[1]. While our rich and powerful elites are driving us off a cliff. The change we need will not be led by them, but in the current climate, a revolution, in the US, is highly unlikely, and if it were to happen would likely result in an extreme far-right authoritarian/theocratic regime even more extreme than the individual enrichment at any cost, "drill baby drill," right to far-right regime that currently rules. And, the US currently controls much of the world (see all western nations observing US illegal sanctions against 1/4-1/3 of the worlds population and also providing support for recent US illegal wars of aggression). Maybe the rise of China will save us, if the US elites do not lash out in desperation to maintain power and e.g., cause a nuclear holocaust. But, pinning hopes of halting environmental destruction on China is a slim hope.
Yes it's a fantasy at this point, but a fantasy that a lot of very smart people and a lot of resources are pursuing. They might succeed. I won't make the call. But plan B clearly is some sort of Fortress Europe and god knows what cyberpunk western is in store for the US. It's plain to me the rich are bracing for disaster and see the rest of us as fodder. At this point the best we can do is pick a place least likely to be overrun in our lifetime. I'm thinking Norway or Switzerland.
I believe that if we acted today, that there could be salvation. Institute massive taxes against plastic use. Ban it for take-out food and other single-use instances. Start heavily taxing other wasteful areas. Heavily encourage if not enforce composting and recycling.
Immediately start restoring mowed lawns with native plants. Ban the use of chemical fertilizers.
It could be done, but we won't. Salvation is at our fingertips, but we close our fists.
We can't design a solution for the problem of 'too many humans devouring Earth's resources'. Locusts can't make plans. Galaxies cannot deviate from collision. I don't understand why we harbor fantasies about being anything other than a natural process that will simply run its course.
That's an interesting perspective. In many ways, it seems to me that evolution did not or cannot account for technological development. I have been trying to read more about what makes life go, and it seems it's highly related to thermodynamics and information theory.
Are you proposing that any life will eventually discover technology (namely the ability to access and manipulate stored energy and also computation)? If so, it's possible that life is accounting for it in ways we don't understand yet.
Whatever we call technology is as natural a process as everything else systems in our Universe cobble together. I see no difference between termite mounds and the Internet. All is bound by the laws of physics. The same processes created complex monkey brains create datacenters. Physics is very clear: only things that are thermodinamically downhill can happen. Human civilization is just a natural, 4D phenomenon we get to see unfold. All in all it won't amount to more then any passing geological pattern on any planet before or since.
That's just because humans have not yet acted coherently yet as a species. There are all kinds of scenarios likely and unlikely that can unfold and none of us know what they are. Nature may be indifferent but she does seem to give us every chance.
By the way, I think you're in a tiny minority if you believe there is no distinction between things that evolve and things that are designed.
I wouldn't me making this argument if I thought everyone thought like me. We have a great capacity for understanding and changing nature, yes. And also the need to believe we are apart and special. But we're not. High rise buildings and fiber optic cables are as natural as anything else that grows on the planet. Drawing a line and calling "artificial" or "designed" on this side is completely arbitrary.
I think your take is very interesting and I agree with the sentiment in general. But humans are different sociobiologically from other animals. As far as I know, we are the only ones that cook our food, which caused drastic changes in the guts of hominids, because the energy required to process food was farmed out to the cooking process and literally to the grass-eating animals we ate. Every since fire and further technological developments, humans have gone against nature and evolution.
I get what you're saying and agree in spirit, but I think it is zooming out a little too far to say that technological development is just another natural process. Yes, it is in a way, but things like computation are truly different beasts. No, humans are not special in terms of our importance, language, meaning, or even intelligence, but my thoughts are that technology is a separate process from natural processes. It is distinct from evolutionary processes.
If you have some interesting reading, I'd love to know it. I haven't necessarily considered the question of technological processes being an extension of natural processes.
As a practical matter I just don't think it's useful to lose the distinction between artificial and natural, even if I cannot define precisely when something is one or the other. In the same way it's not useful to lose the distinction between "selfish" and "selfless" which is a good enough reason to reject psychological egoism.
I think it's okay to accept something is true in an "ultimate sense", but not in a practical sense. e.g. that all technology is a natural process since the causal chain that led to it happened or rather was allowed by physics. To wit, plastics really are natural because humans evolved to be able to make plastics. If you argue against plastics being natural, then you might argue that anything "made" by an individual organism is artificial, which is clearly absurd.
No super interested in finding a resolution here, since I don't think the common meanings are problematic.
I get what you're saying, and I actually like it. I myself have called Life a singular phenomena that describes a (very) complex 4D shape of which we humans are all just a part (and as a group are currently only about as impactful as a large asteroid!). But if you follow this to far you get some nasty results, mostly around a feeling of inevitability and hopelessness, which I honestly don't think has a rational basis. The world is strange and even one good idea, one chance, could turn things around for Life in general, and humans in particular. It certainly needs to be a big change, something like a "phase shift" in human affairs. We certainly cannot bring our traditional values into the future, which were predicated on living in a world that would push back against our ambitions. Nowadays, the ONLY thing restraining humans is humans, and yet self-restraint has never been so out-of-fashion.
These suggestions sound like a classic "central planners know better" attitude.
Would taxing/banning plastic actually reduce waste/pollution? or would the shift to more expensive replacements (paper/wood/etc) actually increase pollution and waste?
Banning chemical fertilisers would almost immediately cause a massive famine, enormous drops in agricultural productivity, etc. People consuming "organic" foods that don't use fertiliser can only do so from the position of privilege wherin chemically-fertilised crops are feeding 95%+ of the population. We even have a real example of the consequences! See Sri Lanka recently :(.
It's times like this I can't help but see why some people are so keen to keep the government away from things.
I should have clarified in my original comment, although I already mentioned this elsewhere prior to your comment. Chemical fertilizers, to my knowledge, serve no actual purpose other than vanity for residential applications. Thus, they should be banned for those purposes. For commercial agriculture, a more long-term approach is clearly needed, but an actual approach should be realized instead of doomsdaying.
Plastics are a nightmare and there is no going back from them. We have inundated ourselves and our environments with micro plastics, and they will not just go away. Paper and wood do not have this problem on the disposal side unless they've been treated with chemicals. I'm not sure where paper and wood come into a discussion with plastics and fertilizers, but I would also support using less wood.
Thank you for the polite response - I realise I was a bit harsh.
I don’t see an issue with chemical fertilisers, personally - I don’t think non commercial users of them are significant enough to be worth any consideration compared ro conventional agriculture.
I can’t say how consequential microplastics are - however banning them for use as packaging etc can have huge negative consequences because they are a very cheap (both in price and energy) packaging compared to most alternatives. I think that if microplastics are a concern, car tires and clothing are much more significant than “single use” instances as good packaging (which I would guess is actually usually disposed of properly most of the time).
I brought up paper because it’s a common substitute packaging (eg cardboard and the like), but is significantly pricier than plastics and more energy intensive to produce.
It’s not an easy Robles to solve, the more so because we use these things because they work so well. I just took exception to singling these things out because they are either critical to modern civilisation (fertiliser) or extremely useful (plastic packaging)
The existence of prior extinction events does not negate the fact that humans are extremely destructive to the planet.
Even in your link to the Permian–Triassic extinction event, one of the most probable causes of loss of marine life was hypercapnia. Several of our modern-day coastal waters are highly hypoxic, enough to cause drastic changes in macro behavior of fish and even whales, and the hypoxic waters are directly caused by human actions.
Humans, in the last century alone, caused half of the total forest loss in the past 10,000 years, and we were directly responsible for a large portion of the other half.
If we go by co2, the guess is that something between 1,000 - 1,500 ppm is required to tip us into a greenhouse phase.
Our current levels are well under 500 ppm.
Humanity will have to work very hard to force the planet out of its current icehouse.
We are definitely having an impact, and could well drive ourselves extinct, but I still see us as unable to implement drastic change, especially as some extinction events have required thousands of years to come to pass.
If we ban chemical fertilizers (what does this include, btw?), will we be able to grow enough food to feed everyone? What else would have to change to make that possible?
Permaculture is soil- and insect-friendly and can be productive and resilient, but it requires more manual labor and setting up a permaculture system takes a lot of knowledge and I think it takes years before it is producing competitively, depending on the soil conditions.
If we ban synthetic fertilizers (and more importantly herbicides/pesticides) abruptly before having established organic methods at scale, that will most likely cause food insecurity like it did in Sri Lanka.
Slowly phasing them out to a level that is not killing us in the long run seems more sensible to me.
I was thinking of banning them for residential use and then re-evaluating their use in commercial agriculture industries. There's no reason that I can think of that they should be used in residential applications. All they do is keep grass artificially green and destroy soil health.
If elites think they can move off planet and somehow survive a total collapse of earth's ecosystems, they are in for a rude awakening. An independent colony able to maintain its inhabitants in any kind of comfort will be dependent on the earth for the foreseeable future.
Its actually difficult for me to believe that any elite would be stupid enough to think they could survive an earth environmental catastrophe in space.
I'm pretty sure at least some of them are dumb enough to think they can survive it on earth, though. And they might be right!
"Its actually difficult for me to believe that any elite would be stupid enough to think they could survive an earth environmental catastrophe in space." You underestimate the raw power of untethered hubris, fueled by venality.
Excuse me but humans have already made immense technological progress through science, creativity, effort, and not listening to doubters like you. What on earth are you talking about and how could you speak so carelessly about such a crucial issue? And where the hell is this bs narrative that it's just a bunch of elites who want to get off earth ? The issue is ensuring the survival of humanity in the current braindead situation that all our eggs are in one basket. Any basic strategy course will tell you this is a good way to lose all your progress after a few iterations. I'm starting to wonder if there's a campaign to discourage the mission to ensure humanity's safety. Hit me back in 3 years when this hits the news and thank me then but it will probably be too late.
You're making claims discouraging people to seek a solution to a VERY important issue. Kindly show some substantial info demonstrating evidence humans would be reliant on Earth. The entire point of such a mission is not to be. And lots of materials exist elsewhere. Again kindly show us proof of your extremely dangerous claims.
It's a catch all metaphor. Most likely we will see some version of fortress Europe and the US devolving to frontier economy. Frontex is already getting bigger budgets, more boots on the ground and better kit with each passing year.
I hate to break it to you, but Earth before humans has largely been dead for hundreds or thousands of years, depending upon the exact region you're talking about.
I'm a bit confused on what you're getting at and your timelines. Earth was around for billions of years before humans and had life on it the entire time except possibly the first few hundred million years.
"Earth before humans is in a death spiral" says to me they're talking about earth as it existed before humans, not life on earth at all.
Earth before humans died with the rise of civilization, and especially global trade. We transformed large swathes of land into farmland and urban areas. We enabled the transfer of invasive species throughout the world. We redirected and sucked rivers dry for our own purposes. We dumped our garbage and literal shit in waterways. We destroyed the majority of natural habitats.
And this all happened hundreds or thousands of years ago.
I was surprised when I moved into a German apartment that my landlord apologized about their being moss between the tiles on our patio. My honest response was, "oh no, moss looks better than an empty crack." I was really surprised when I for the first time saw people outside literally using blow-torches to kill moss in their driveway cracks.
The dislike of clover is a really strange one for me, too. When I was growing up I loved the clover patches in the yard; they're like green clouds floating across the lawn, and the honeysuckle brings happy honey bees. Dandylions are pretty, too, admittedly more so in the yellow phase than the gray phase. But then they make nice toys!
Generally speaking I find the natural aesthetic more beautiful and more serene than the golf course look.
> And yet, no one does it. They turn their lawns into wastelands and never even use them. I've heard that lawns should be compared to deserts but that even that is disregarding the biodiversity that deserts have over lawns.
This was true for me for a long time. We had a lawn, and we had kids, and I believed that kids w/out a lawn was a travesty. Special lady friend was like, "dude we're surrounded by lawns," and it's true. There are 2 parks within walking distance of here and a big plot of grass at the local church. We killed the lawn, the kids didn't care, and I just haul them to the park. Still working on better habitat but it's coming along. And yeah as you say the exciting stuff going on in the soil and above ground is just amazing. Wild beans (not edible but pretty), edibles like dock, orach, dandelions & mallow ... just all kinds of stuff.
It's good to see a comment that recognises that this "bug splatter on the windshield" data is mostly just an easily observed hook to connect the measured declines to people's everyday life experiences.
The topic seems to come up here ever few months, and there's always a significant percentage of the discussion devoted to aerodynamic effects, or changes in insect distribution specific to roadside habitats. Those converstations often feel like "middlebrow dismissal": people who think the fact they can come up with a plausible alternate explaination for the data given a few seconds thought means it's likely that the studies are totally flawed and can be ignored.
Meanwhile if you dig in to the actual evidence, the studies based on vehicle data show a small negative correlation between vehicle age and number of impacted flying insects (i.e. older cars have slightly fewer splats, not more). More importantly, the general trends of declining biomass of (especially, but not only) flying insects reproduce over a wide range of methodologies and habitats. For skeptical readers, there are some links to studies in a previous comment I made on a previous thread on this same general topic [1].
Having said that, I think you've missed one of the big factors that's likely to contribute to the decline: the widespread use of insecticides (especially) and herbicides in industrial agriculture. Studies on bees show that even insects exposed to something much lower than the LD50 of certain insecticides experience behavioural changes that dramatically decrease their survival rates. And because "pest" insects typicaly have short lifecycles and rapid reproduction rates, they're often best placed to evolve tolerances for the insecticides, so there's pressure on farmers to use more and more to get the same effect.
For anyone who's interested in an introduction to this topic aimed at the general public (like me!), but written by a Professor of Entomology, I can recommend Slient Earth [2].
I happen to study/photograph insects as an amateur and can casually confirm the collateral damage pesticides have on insect life.
A common manifestation of it is to find lethargic insects. Bodily fully intact and seeming healthy, yet barely able to move. Insects normally skittish that you can simply pick up. I'm not talking about insects at the end of their life cycle or them being very cold. There's something very wrong with these individuals, I believe studies suggest their brains are messed up from the pesticides.
I think it might be the same disinformation scheme as the climate science "The individual must/can fix it" - No policy must force industries to find other ways to make a profit with agriculture. There are natural ways to deal with insects and unwanted plants.
> The point of an insecticide is to kill the specific insect being a pest to the crop.
Even this can cause a collapse by removing a food source from other predators.
> I can save you the time. There will be no world.
This is true. Insects are food for a huge number of predators, and insect larvae are a really important component of having soil capable of growing plants.
Insecticides are designed to wipe out global populations of insects rather than just controlling pest insects inside a limited area? If you have actual evidence for this, it seem like it would form the basis of significant lawsuits against pesticide companies because we would have evidence of intent to cause significant ecological damage.
Yup. Visited the US Midwest (Minnesota) recently and driving from the airport city to another smaller city, started going out into farmland.
At first, it seemed like a nice bucolic change. But soon, it took on a far darker aspect - this was a barren monoculture, as far as the eye could see, for dozens of miles. Where to the birds, reptiles, amphibians, mammals, and insects live? The land is not only covered with chemicals to kill or repel any now-unwelcome residents, but there is simply no usable habitat (and a thin row of trees every mile or so doesn't count).
It was a truly dystopian experience, and more so by knowing that this goes on for thousands of square miles. This is not our grandparent's farmland anymore. This is not nature. This is one species becoming a literal plague on the planet. It is not sustainable.
At one point during the development of California agriculture, there was an idea that farms should only be 160 acres in size, since that was what was manageable and profitable for a smallholder family. I wonder what the land would be like if we had managed to enforce that. There would probably be more crop diversity at least, and habitats in between the farms.
Kind of like anti-trust enforcement for the land itself
It could have just as easily driven innovation towards efficiently working those kinds of plots, reduced topsoil loss and degradation (reducing fertilizer costs), reduced requirements for pesticides (lower costs again), and improved yields driving down prices.
Especially now with accelerating agri-robotics developments, mid-sized farms like that can take best advantage.
That kind of comment shows that you are using zero knowledge of growing, farming, or that complexities of soil chemistry and soil biology even exist. Not helpful. If you have some such actual knowledge, show some. Sheesh.
There is certainly more I could learn about soil chemistry and biology. Jaut like there seems to be plenty more you could learn about basic economics and market psychology.
Wow, it's refreshing to see a Dutch person write down the impact of nitrogen as facts. Around me, its seems like slowly everyone is starting to doubt/deny the impact of nitrogen and whether it's something we need to care about. I'm starting to feel less at home in this country by the day because of it (and all the upside down flags consequently).
It's a worldwide thing. An urbanized population does not care about nature. At all. Modern life is almost fully abstracted away from it, and it seems fine to destroy it for as long as our delicate lifestyle remains intact.
Every once in a while, we watch a documentary like Planet Earth. It inspires even the most cynical stoic. And we feel terrible about our negative role.
But the next day we go on as usual. And as soon as a tiny thing is asked of us to better the course, we resist like a maniac.
> An urbanized population does not care about nature. At all.
My experience has been the exact opposite. Growing up in rural areas, most people seemed to treat nature as an endless resource to be exploited for personal enrichment. Any discussion of ecological regulation was met with harsh rebuke about "jobs" and "freedom" (i.e. the freedom to extract value by exploiting nature).
As I moved to more urban areas, people were more and more ecologically focused on the long-term impacts of natural exploitation. Today I live in a dense metro area (Seattle) where I've never been around a greater concentration of nature-focused people.
You're quite right. And it's even worse than that. I had this part in my earlier comment but deleted it as I did not want to distract from my main message by causing a political stir.
The controversial statement being that the issue extends into (many) indigenous communities. We have this pristine idea of them, as original peoples living in harmony with nature.
That's not the reality on the ground. I've traveled to a lot of remote areas where we frequently encountered illegal activity by locals and even park rangers. Poaching...anything and everything, including rare flowers. Logging. Gold mining. Hunting critically extinct species even when alternatives (for food) are widely available.
You can't explain it by poverty alone, there's a general sense of total carelessness. A very clear example of that is people dumping their trash in the river, in forests, everywhere. Many good faith reforestation attempts soon are gamed and corrupted.
> as soon as a tiny thing is asked of us to better the course
Well, I also see a lot of people who do the tiny thing but not the big thing. Plenty of people around me are reducing their meat intake (and are vocal about it), because climate change, but still fly on airplanes, some multiple times a year. It's so incredibly frustrating that many people are just green washing their lives, but are oblivious to the fact they're not really doing much at all.
I do have massive respect for the people I do know that have quit eating meat and are now doing all their travels by train.
Respectfully, I think your take on this does not work.
If before you have a frequent flyer that regularly eats meat, and next they stop eating meat, that is to be celebrated. It's still massive progress. Further, their footprint from flying may improve over time as airlines are investing in sustainability.
From flying 3 times a year to 2 times a year is big progress. From eating lots of meat to somewhat less, is progress.
By implying footprint perfection, it all becomes very reductive and people will reject it. With that mindset, you'll be able to find "dirt" on anyone. I mean, how very polluting must David Attenborough be?
As for bettering the course regarding insects, I wasn't even suggesting CO2 reduction. Just introducing some small spaces where wildflowers can grow, and they will come. It takes almost nothing.
> From flying 3 times a year to 2 times a year is big progress.
These people are going from 0-1 time a year to 2-3 times a year, because they're starting to earn more and can therefore take more trips. They are ignorant to the fact that's more wasteful than eating meat. This is typical personal green-washing, which is the part that annoys me.
I understand that perfect is the enemy of good and I'm not implying that everyone should be perfect.
> Around me, its seems like slowly everyone is starting to doubt/deny the impact of nitrogen and whether it's something we need to care about.
I'm not sure why that's surprising. Our food supply depends on using nitrogen at the moment. You can't just ban it cold-turkey without transitioning to an alternative that doesn't threaten the food supply. Particularly with inflation issues, further destabilizing the food supply is insane at this time. The whole climate change agenda will be in jeopardy if this isn't handled well.
They could define and enforce environmental laws that would make the current way of farming that is destroying nature impossible. The farmers would need to adapt or go bankrupt.
Instead they get offered millions. And in response they terrorize our society.
It’s also sad to see what people are doing to their gardens over here. Fake grass, no plants/just bricks. Not to mention the municipalities mowing nice patches of grass/plants/flowers where insects thrive.
It's crazy! On one side, I have a neighbour with all slate and concrete backyard, and a barrier at the top of the fence (to keep the fancy cats in 'o_O ) covered with plastic vines. I think they have one actual living tree and maybe a flowerpot.
Fortunately, on the other side ... I have the head of the groene commissie (neighbourhood gardening enthusiastc) and a beautiful tended garden. Mine is the most natural: a barely-tended jungle which gets trimmed and brushed once a year. We have hedgehogs!
We installed ~200m^2 of green roofs in the neighbourhood and there are bug hotels all over the place so we are doing relatively well. Quite a few different varieties of bees.
All this green absorbs a lot of heat, and manages rainwater which is important at 0 above sea level and 2m below the nearby canal.
In far too many parts of the US, what you're doing with your yard would be considered "neglect" and might result in harassment from your neighbors or even fines.
It would be nice if people realized that they can have a low-maintenance, inexpensive, and insect-friendly garden full of pretty wild flowers, by planting a perennial meadow. This needs to be cut once a year.
While this works, an alternative if you have a lawn already is to just stop cutting it every x weeks but mow once or twice a year. Mow paths where needed. More often than not there are already seeds/plants in the soil which just never got the chance to grow. And if not, depending on where you live, fauna and wind will transport seeds to your garden. The end result (mind you, takes years) will usually be similar: of the seed mixes bought, a bunch won't grow, others might but won't thrive. Whereas starting from 'scratch' this also happens. And what's left are those which happen to thrive best on the local soil type and circumstances, which usually is what works best for the local ecosystem.
If I didn’t cut my yard for a year I wouldn’t need a mower, I’d need a large brush-clearing tractor. It’s already almost impossible to cut with a mower after four to five weeks.
I can stroll through acres of local meadows and not find any ticks. Once I dare come close to bushes or go off tracks in the woods though, it's a disaster. I.e. I don't know why, but in any case the 'grass is riddled with ticks' seems highly location-dependent.
One thing I've noticed after moving back to the Netherlands is how absolutely obsessed people are with keeping things "tidy". In a way, it's nice I guess, at least sometimes, but it comes with some serious costs too. This is not unique to the Netherlands, but we're probably the best (or worst?) at it, except maybe Singapore.
From near the end of the article:
"Sometimes people find it a bit gross when we put the mulch back in plant pots, because it smells a bit woody"
Are people really so detached from nature these days that the smell of wet wood puts them off? I do despair for humankind some days when I read this sort of thing.
It just so happens I live in Eindoven, so I guess some more explaining is needed. They're working with the leafeblower now. I hate those contraptions so much.
I blow them off my wood deck, so they don't rot and damage the wood.
I let them lie on the rest of my 1.6 acres. And the 1 acre that's forested, we're working on trying to de-invasive-ize the forest and try to help rehabilitate it. Its just 2 of us, but we're trying.
Are there any guides on "deinvasiveizing"? It seems like a complicated topic. Some non native life is considered to be non invasive, having found a homeostasis its new nich (common carp as an example). And some native life is considered invasive by some because it is so well adapted it crowds out all other native life (some bindweeds)
Given the dramatic impacts we have made on a global scale, is trying to preserve de-humanified areas realistic anymore? Or are we supposed to simply try to maximize the diversity of life without regard to what life was in a place before humans arrived?
We're looking at the super-low-bar of doing things like removing known invasive plants as published in the state's DNR. They maintain a yearly list of nasties to remove.
We also don't use any chemicals to do the killing, as so many of those have terrible side effects. Killing larger invasives involves something as simple as "black contractor bag enveloping and tied at base". It captures all the seeds, kills the plant, and provides easy removal.
We also see that a lot of "lawn grasses" are also pretty invasive especially to forests. So, we also try to keep the lawn encroachment from happening..... as much. Ive done the high tech solution of "lay a slab of plywood on the grasses at the edge of the forest"!
We're also designing our garden with local plants in mind, including rarer plants for our area. If/when those flower and seed, we're seeing natives with natives. And the non-natives we bring in are checked for invasiveness.
Basically, it's being low-key stewards to the land.
Thanks! One well intentioned mistake we made at a previous residence was to plant some flowers for pollinators that were not native. They weren't invasive, but they were prolific. The issue was that they bloomed late enough that the butterflies didn't move on and froze.
wow, that article mentions controversy over the smell of leaf mulch... kinda reflective of how sterile those cities must be for someone who has never visited, so much less surprising they have fewer bugs. Heaven help them if someone ever puts in manure or fish compost :)
Not to mention the municipalities mowing nice patches of grass/plants/flowers where insects thrive.
That lacks an important nuance: in most circumstances (regarding soil type/nitrogen deposition), not mowing at all would lead to those patches being overgrown by fast growers leading to less plant diversity. Can happen in as little as a year or 2. So the mowing itself is not the problem, it's the amount, how and when.
Mowing itself is the problem. Fast growers are just the first step in a recovery process that takes place when a previously stunted ecosystem is allowed to heal. Other types of plants follow in subsequent years, leading to a much more healthy ecosystem than when you mow it all down to hell.
You really cannot talk about this in statements like they apply everywhere. Here's an example: around where I live, the number 1 activity by nature preservation groups when it comes to restoring grasslands of all kinds, is mowing. For a couple of reasons, but the main one being that nitrogen deposition fertilizes the soil too much, so it gets countered by removing biomass via mowing. Not doing that results is fast growers. Not because the'yre indicating a recovery process, just because they outgrow what was there originally. Which is the opposite of recovery.
leading to a much more healthy ecosystem than when you mow it all down to hell.
When I say "it's the amount, how and when" that implicates 'not mowing it all down to hell' is not the right way :)
As the other reply said, each area is unique and so there is no general rule that applies to every location on earth.
Where I live the native prairie was naturally mowed by the bison roaming around, and so not mowing leads to a number of problems as the plants around here depend on that regular mowing. Various lightening strikes and the like ("Indians") caused regular fires as well, which took care of overgrowth. Mowing simulates that without the fire. (this is both good and bad - it makes for cleaner air, but those fires also put charcoal into the ground and so made the prairie net carbon negative over the long term which is something we desperately need)
While I don’t disagree with those two points I don’t know if they’re the primary cause.
I also think it’s important to put it into context.
1. These insects weren’t really robust to begin with. Take the monarch butterfly in the North America. They actually needed primarily milkweed to survive. A single point of failure (milkweed) can cause the population to collapse. When we put up houses and converted land to farms, you’re correct we killed many of the native species, but those species were HIGHLY tuned to a particular niche. In 100-200 years it’s likely the insects that survived will re-occupy new niches.
2. Insects typically need a much smaller range to survive, so hikes in the same woods as when you were a kid doesn’t add up. Unless there was another massive environmental issue - such as pesticides or chemicals like DDT which have a secondary impact. Personally, that bird egg analogy sounds exactly like what the US saw with DDT and the collapse of the eagle population.
3. In the 1950s in the Midwest there had already been farmland all over for 50+ years. Same with Ireland (for hundreds). The insect populations have only noticeably declined in the last few decades. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough historical data to confirm what it is exactly. Even in the 1970s you’d have solid layers of bugs on windshields driving between cornfields. Now, nothing.
I strongly object to the framing where a species is considered logical to go extinct for it was not "robust" enough.
The words "specialist" and "niche" are incredibly misplaced as it comes to insects. Consider butterflies, many depending on specific host plants. The host plant is in decline hence the butterfly disappears.
Weak species. Not "robust". The point that is being missed here is that the host plant is supposed to be widely available in any half-decent ecosystem. It isn't rare, would normally be widespread, and it has very low needs. Just a tiny bit of space and healthy soil.
We're not wiping out specialists, we're wiping out the underlying habitat and ecosystem altogether.
That is a very human-centric viewpoint and a very strange one at that. It's almost egocentric.
Were big cats such as mountain lions and bobcats not robust enough in America? Because they've been eradicated due to habitat loss.
Is it really a surprise that animals that have evolved over millions of years to fit within the balance of nature are having difficulty adapting in just decades to humanity's technology destruction of that balance? The fact that some are able to make it through that imbalance is not a justification.
It's weird that you basically seem to blame evolution. And it's not just about specific populations. It's all about their interactions and relationships. We do not fully understand how all these things tie together as a system. So much of it is disappearing, we really have no idea what could happen to our ecosystems. For the most part, it cannot be good.
I am in general seriously concerned about soil and insect health. We take leaves and grass and native plants off of land and then instead needlessly dump water and fertilizer in their place because what's left is not self-sustaining. It's literally the most wasteful process you can think of for managing land, and yet we do it in full force.
I planted native plants and let things grow up in my yard this year, and it's amazing how popular the areas get with insects. This is just one year. Next year, I am hoping for much more, especially now that I know what I'm doing for the most part.
> In the 1950s in the Midwest there had already been farmland all over for 50+ years. Same with Ireland (for hundreds). The insect populations have only noticeably declined in the last few decades. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough historical data to confirm what it is exactly. Even in the 1970s you’d have solid layers of bugs on windshields driving between cornfields. Now, nothing.
This assumes that farming methods have remained identical since the 1950s or 70s, but they haven't. I don't know if the parent poster is correct, but I don't think is a good argument unless you also account for changes in agricultural practices in the last 50+ years.
> In 100-200 years it’s likely the insects that survived will re-occupy new niches.
Do you have any data to back this up?
Also, the problem is that not many insects ARE going to survive.
> The insect populations have only noticeably declined in the last few decades.
This is probably outright misleading, since you don't have the data prior to those decades. The common mistake is that people use their own lifespan as a measure for things.
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Everybody talks about the gender pay gap and ethnic diversity these days, but biodiversity is not on the radar :(
Regarding the niche comment. Look at any invasive species. Once it arrives within 10-20 years it can dominate the region it’s in. Evolution occurs the same way; once something mutates in a way with competitive advantage it expands. With insects this can happen rapidly (because they lay so many eggs). I don’t have it handy now, but we have examples of this in grasshoppers.
Pesticide resistant insects are another example. Now, this assumes we don’t keep altering pesticides, but we do. If we keep trying to reduce insect populations we can, so I don’t think it’ll happen unless we allow it to happen.
As for the other comment, my point is really we have records showing massive amount of insects all throughout history until the introduction of pesticides. Even during the Great Depression in the US we had massive swarms of insects. Once pesticides were introduced at scale we noticed a decline in recorded swarms until now we don’t even see them on windshields.
An additional problem for monarch butterflies is a pair of introduced species, both swallow-worts. These are in the milkweed family, and they induce the butterflies to lay eggs on them, but the caterpillars die after only a few days.
I wonder how common this sort of thing is. Insects evolve to feed on certain plants, and not feed on others, but invasives could screw that up.
> These insects weren’t really robust to begin with. Take the monarch butterfly in the North America.
This a horrifying sentiment.
The modern monarch butterfly as a species is two million years old. In less than 200 years, we have mostly wiped it off the map, and the excuse is, "They weren't really robust to begin with"?
> some groups are disappearing whilst others remain
Speaking of those that remain, I can say beyond reasonable doubt that there is an insane percentage increase in stinkbug populations in recent years. Fuckers get absolutely everywhere.
How would that work? We don't have enough land as it is. And we can't pay for the additional labor small farms need, or food inflation will explode.
Making agriculture unproductive will just push the demand outwards like a beaker of toxic reactants boiling over. We can't impose more trade restrictions on foreign agricultural goods either, for fear of a trade war.
This hopeless romanticism of small organic mom-and-pop farming is misguided. The only solution I see is huge, highly efficient, automated, but also highly regulated farms. That, and veganism.
Small farms are more productive per acre [1] even before considering the increased fossil footprint of 'efficient' farms.
>we can't pay for the additional labor small farms need, or food inflation will explode.
Additional unskilled jobs might well be worth the tradeoff, particularly for the most vulnerable members of society.
>This hopeless romanticism of small organic mom-and-pop farming is misguided.
Russia's Dacha model produces something like 60% of the country's food through hobby 'farms' that regular people mostly go to on the weekends. It's not a hard model to replicate, I'm planting a food shrubland in my suburban home. It won't produce a large part of my food budget but it'll certainly be resource-positive as opposed to a lawn. My labour inputs I'd spend at a gym otherwise. As work-from-home becomes more normalized, the average garden size will probably increase. The problem isn't economic but cultural.
>huge, highly efficient, automated, but also highly regulated farms. That, and veganism.
There seems to be a correlation between belief in factory farming and veganism. Those stances align on pathos but diverge on logos and ethos.
The linked study uses data from peasant farms in developing economies (Madagascar, India, etc.) from half a century ago or earlier. From the point of view of the west, that it would be measuring the productivity of very very small farms vs very small farms where the vast majority of labor is done by hand. Skimming over the article it seems that it concludes that under pre-mechanized conditions, larger farms have less available labor per unit land area. And that labor per unit land area is an important factor in agricultural productivity. This is hardly a surprise.
This is very much not like how farming is done in developed nations or even most developing nations today. And unless you want to force people to live like dirt poor peasants of the past, hopefully won't ever be done again.
Well, the hard part to replicate is destroying economy to force people to use those collective gardens. Shops were next to empty. Commercial variety was non existent. The rigid command economy didn't allow enterprise to address needs. Thus you had 2 ways to have good food - relatives in countryside or your own collective garden lot.
It's both economy in culture. Here in Lithuania those gardens survived well into 90s. During the transition, many people went on to do substance farming in addition to day job. Or, if they were unemployed, in exchange of it. But now people work cushy jobs and less and less people do that. It's down to gardening enthusiasts in the young generation. And even then the pattern is completely different. More about trying out exotic stuff for shit and giggles. Rather than aiming for good amount of food and then conserving it for the winter. Energy costs probably make it cheaper to buy jam rather than cook it too...
Only discussing the land statement here, but we have loads and loads and loads of unused farmland.
At least, that is true in Canada, and I suspect the US, and I know in the EU some are paid not to farm.
In Canada, we have quotas on some things, to prevent over production.
There are two real issues:
* drought, or summers with few sunny days, reducing yields
* random new diseases
So we need that fallow land, just in case, which is why people are given inventives to have farm land, but not use it.
Yet we still have so much farm land, that we sell the best of it to developers, who then create housing.
We have loads of unused farmland.
One last thing. China's population is going to almost halve, over the next 15 years, Russia will have a major population decline, and the most industrialized nations are the same.
Canada has solved this top heavy, old age die off, with immigration. More than 30% of Canadian citizens, for example, we not born in Canada.
But for those with lower immigration numbers, and low birth rates (basically the entire industrialized world), populations will plummet by 30% to 50% in the next 25 years.
China had the one child program, and the birth rate in Canada is less than 1 for every 2 adults, for Canadians boen here. The rest of the West is the same.
So worldwide, our population will plummet very soon.
Yes, especially on the east coast, vast swaths of what was once farmland and pasture is now forest again. For example, most of Connecticut's forests were cut down for not very productive farms before good transportation infrastructure allowed that activity to be moved to more suitable areas. It's now forest again and atlantic salmon are back for the first time in a century.
The current agricultural land in US alone can easily feed by various estimates at least 2 billions people. The trouble is that most of it is used to grow corn etc. to feed animals in the industrial meat production.
There is plenty of land under cultivation. We already produce enough calories to feed every person on earth, they just aren't distributed sufficiently.
Currently you have most of the California central valley planted in high margin crops like almonds and pistachios because they maximize farmer profits (despite their unsustainable demands on the water supply). If the goal was to maximize human nutrition the land use would look very different.
> How would that work? We don't have enough land as it is.
With capitalism there can never be enough of any natural resource. When there is enough, it will be put to more extravagant and wastefull purposes.
The original purpose of a lawn was to show that you are so rich and have so much land that you can dedicate some of it to just grass.
The purpose of a tough guy wearing a massive golden chain in a bad neighbourhood is to show that noone dares touch him
And the purpose of a yaht is to show off - the yahts dont even cross the ocean, billionaires hire special ships to lift the whole yaht and move it across atlantic.
So whether its yahts or aingle use plastic cups, or bitcoin mining, there is never enough.
Probably better to stop propping up the small farms and let the unproductive land be reclaimed by nature. Extensively use pest resistant GMO crops to increase yields on less land and overall lessen the land needed for farming. At the same time, lessening sprawl would be quite helpful. I see plenty of people 'move out to the country' and then spray pesticides over their entire 5 acre lawn.
They've been visiting politicians their homes with torches, threatening them and explicitly their kids, blockading highways with burning rubble, blocking highways with asbestos, using their tractors to rip out doors out of government buildings.
What is most aggrieving to me is that the police is pseudo on the side of the farmers. The head of the police said that he 'fully understands the plight of the farmers' and will keep on a policy of de-escalation. Scant few fines too.
Meanwhile a couple of climate protestors that tie themselves to a bridge get their head bashed in and then get fines of €300-5000.
I mean placing the blame for climate change on the backs of Dutch farmers was absurd. They should have started with severe controls on importing goods from countries with high levels of pollution
They were blamed not for climate change, instead for nitrogen disposition.
This is a uniquely Dutch problem, largely unrelated to CO2. In larger countries, there's clear zoning and distance between protected nature and intensive agriculture. Not in the Netherlands, where these two things are directly bordering each other. Hence, the agriculture very directly destroys its surrounding nature. Not by CO2, by nitrogen.
Do you have a source of the government "placing the blame for climate change on the backs of Dutch farmers"? The Dutch government wanted[0] to curb emissions, and since (high intensity) farms are huge polluters, some of the measurements affected farmers.But I can't remember them placing the blame on the farmers.
> placing the blame for climate change on the backs of Dutch farmers was absurd
Nobody is doing that, this is blatant misinformation that is being spread by interest groups that profit off Dutch farmers.
Most of the discussion around farmers over here has to do with nitrogen. As the OP mentioned, it is causing acidification of nature areas, which is negatively impacting all sorts of wildlife. It's a mostly local problem, often caused by intensive farming and is mostly unrelated to climate change.
> Most of the discussion around farmers over here has to do with nitrogen.
Yes, and nitrogen fertilizer yields nitrous oxide which is a greenhouse gas implicated in climate change [1]. This is not just "misinformation", this is part of the reason behind the push to ban nitrogen fertilizer.
> this is part of the reason behind the push to ban nitrogen fertilizer
Sure, that might be true, but it is definitely blatant misinformation that Dutch farmers are being blamed for climate change. It is not part of the discussion that's currently ongoing in The Netherlands and that is purposefully being misrepresented in (mostly American) right-wing media. This needs to be clear, because the violent protests by framers in The Netherlands are being abused by foreign interest groups who frame them as protests against those farmers being blamed for climate change.
This is a real issue, because this is starting to become an actual discussion point for those who are supporting the farmers. They are, for example, asking why farmers are now targeted and airports are not, while farmers cause 88x more nitrogen emissions than flights in the Netherlands. Also, those emissions are less focused on the problem areas.
Misinformation is incredibly harmful in this discussion and therefore it's incredibly important to keep the facts straight. Otherwise all discussions and arguments will mix and there will never actually be anything done.
Given that climate change is the primary reason for restricting nitrogen fertilizer, it's implicit that the farmers are contributing to climate change. Are the people claiming that the farmers are being blamed for climate change saying that the farmers are the only or primary driver for climate change? That would obviously be incorrect, but the former claim is absolutely correct.
Maybe it's not part of the conversation in the Netherlands, but I'm not seeing what's factually wrong about it. Are they actually claiming that climate change is part of the discussion in the Netherlands? If this isn't part of the conversation in the Netherlands, what exactly are they talking about?
Given that climate change is the primary reason for restricting nitrogen fertilizer
That's simply not true. The primary reason for restricting nitrogen fertilizer in NL is habitat change (i.e. it has profound effects on the habitats of native species), not climate change.
> Are the people claiming that the farmers are being blamed for climate change saying that the farmers are the only or primary driver for climate change?
All the comments in this thread are replies to someone who seems to do exactly that by defending farmers "visiting politicians their homes with torches, threatening them and explicitly their kids, blockading highways with burning rubble, blocking highways with asbestos, using their tractors to rip out doors out of government buildings." by saying "I mean placing the blame for climate change on the backs of Dutch farmers was absurd."
This video is full of blatant misinformation and misrepresentation. Our current discussion is not about climate change, it's about acidification and that's it. No matter how true your comments may be, it has nothing to do with the situation in the Netherlands and it continues the spread of this misinformation. Please stop, it's harmful.
Good to know, but I don't see why it's harmful. Here in Canada they're also contemplating nitrogen fertilizer bans for reasons of climate change, so it's not like this argument isn't being made.
This article is pretty characteristic of the chemical industry influence trying to muddle the waters.
I've watched recently a conference[1] by several renowned scientists. They affirm that neonicotinoids / neonics are responsible of at least 80% of the decline.
They also affirm that the "merchants of doubt" are working their best to muddle the evidence with things like "there are multiple factors", "it's complicated", "we need more research" etc.
But just like the overwhelming majority of lung cancer comes from smoking, the overwhelming factor in insects decline (and its consequences like birds decline) is PESTICIDES and neonicotinoids in particular.
> But just like the overwhelming majority of lung cancer comes from smoking
This is true.
It's also true that less than 30% (in Europe as low as 15%) of smokers get lung cancer. [0]
I point this out b/c I always believed that "if you smoke, you will get lung cancer" whereas the data was "if you get lung cancer, odds are it's from smoking"
I wish that more information was presented this way but I also get that if your goal is to stop smoking then saying "smoking == lung cancer" is a better persuasion play than "odds are you won't get lung cancer if you smoke"
Overall about an half of all smokers die of tobacco-related disease. It may be lung cancer, throat cancer, various digestive cancers, heart attack, aneurysm and all sort of painful diseases. Lung cancer is just the most obvious one.
My neighbour looked like just out of a zombie film complete with rotting, stinking lumps of flesh hanging from the side of his jaw and slime / pus dropping from his mouth for two frigging years (throat and jaw cancer, got fed by catheter for 18 months too). He had to get sure no child was around before getting out, because the view would have traumatized them.
My sister-in-law died three months after retiring of a blazing-fast brain cancer, just a couple of days before Christmas. First symptoms mid-November. At least it was somewhat fast.
Smoking increases your risks for a lot of things besides just lung cancer. I never thought of lung cancer as the only bad outcome of smoking in my impressionable years.
To everyone replying “aerodynamics”, I’ve had the same car for about 9 years now and the drive along the 5 from Bay Area to LA feels like there’s fewer bugs on my windshield (granted not recorded diligently for scientific purposes but whereas before I’d need to scrub the windshield at least once halfway these days I can drive all the way and still don’t need a wash at the end)
Same goes for the argument that bugs have evolved to migrate away from the roads - the 5 has been a busy thruway for a long time with lots of cars and trucks.
The article is short but says scientists have clear data that populations have plummeted and the larger vehicle consumer trend + more people on the road means that there’s fewer bugs to encounter per windshield on top of that.
I actually find it rather interesting how many people here, in a forum I generally assume to be better informed than elsewhere, seem wholly unaware of the dramatic decrease in insects over the last few decades.
People who think they know better are more likely to comment than those who will simply say "huh, interesting!" You will often get a somewhat biased set of comments.
I mean, hop into any threat remotely related to COVID and you'll see people come out in swarms of common science denial.
Just because people might be knowledgeable about certain technologies doesn't make them knowledgeable about anything else. In fact I'd argue that it heavily biases them to making more mistakes in other fields, especially considering that many tech problems are 'solved' by going to a search engine -- that's not a good way to do science.
I also find it rather interesting to see talks about insect decline while it's only one part of the larger issue, rated by some as important as the climate crisis: the biodiversity crisis. Dramatic decreases are happening for way more species than just insects.
> Same goes for the argument that bugs have evolved to migrate away from the roads
There are many studies in all kind of environments, even in the middle of the woods, in natural reserves; insects are going down both in term of diversity and numbers everywhere
NY state has a long running study where on July 15th every year they would put up a super bright lighthouse bulb in the middle of the woods and put it over a tarp. After they night they'd weigh the physical mass of insect life that had come to the light, and died, overnight.
I forget the exact %, but they'd seen a 50 or 60 percent reduction in mass since the 70's, some depressingly high number.
I don't think this would stop anyone from using the evolution argument, since in their mind this would just show that they evolved to not fly towards the deadly light.
What about a thousand lit streets and a million cars every night swashing bugs? What about night lights helping predators see the bugs to weed out those light lovers?
I’m not saying these are true. But your response lacked imagination :)
Same tests have been run on licence plates. As they have remained in a similar position for decades, aerodynamics is clearly not the major contributing factor.
> To everyone replying “aerodynamics”, I’ve had the same car for about 9 years now and the drive along the 5 from Bay Area to LA feels like there’s fewer bugs on my windshield (granted not recorded diligently for scientific purposes but whereas before I’d need to scrub the windshield at least once halfway these days I can drive all the way and still don’t need a wash at the end)
Hasn’t California had extremely climate events over the last decade (wildfires, ongoing drought)? Given that bugs tend to be sensitive to air quality, this would likely local population decline which would then lead to the effect you’ve observed.
I welcome anyone to come to Prince Edward Island and enjoy the many, many mosquitos and midges our Island has to offer. They can be heard as small “pops” while driving.
A boom of one particular species is not necessarily indicative of a healthy ecosystem. We don't welcome algal blooms as signs of life bouncing back; rather, they are brutally disruptive to ecosystems. They leave mass death in their wake. Without a closer study of which species you're observing (they might be human-borne invasive species after all), it's not really easy to say if what you're seeing is healthy at all. And the timescales are important. This year or this decade might be a boom and 20 years from now they've managed to deplete their environment of resources and crash.
Yeah, I certainly don't doubt that there are global changes going on, but that particular drive along I-5 is confounded by many other local variables.
I too notice changes in the amount of bugs having driven that route periodically for about 30 years. Due to economic and weather conditions over decades, there are very obvious changes in whether you are driving by grassland, irrigated crops and orchards, defunct and desiccated crops and orchards, or graded and developed human environments. The road has also widened and gotten much more traffic.
The general trend is more human presence year over year, but the agricultural activity is more cyclic. As I understand it, these areas are only viable to irrigate in wet years, because the senior water rights are held and used much further north and east along the CA-99 corridor. In droughts, these more recently developed farms dry up first.
It's also of course very seasonal, with bug populations booming and then disappearing much like wild flowers and migrating bird flocks along the same route. In the heaviest bug carnage periods, driving this section of I-5 can be like driving through the US midwest during a grasshopper or cicada boom.
Also, the "bugs evolve away" would need evolutionary pressure being involved. But the explanation I got was the available biomass for bugs is such that any chunk of bugs killed on the road was easily filled by other bugs eating their lunch and procreating.
Also note that "species are evolving to adapt to XYZ" really means "everything that can't deal with XYZ is dying". If the ecosystem just doesn't have any species that can deal with XYZ, then that part of the ecosystem just dies.
> Also, the "bugs evolve away" would need evolutionary pressure being involved
I do not claim that evolution is the reason for the reduction in dead bugs, but if "go near road" has a increased risk of death due to automobiles, there absolutely is selective pressure to not "go near road". Bugs that get killed by cars don't procreate (again) after all.
Yes but the pressure is weaker than one might intuitively guess. There are billions of bugs. Even near roads, very few of them are going to be hit by cars, comparatively. Near roads there often are ditches with some water or moisture, making an environment otherwise beneficial for bugs.
Also, decreased road side windshield bug smashing coincides with measured loss of insect biomass:
> Disputing that feels more and more like disputing global warming being a thing.
There's a reason I started my comment with "I do not claim that evolution is the reason for the reduction in dead bugs". I was just nitpicking and not trying to be the devil's advocate.
What if, with more cars and bigger windshields, we're just grabbing less and less of these bugs due to more of them being killed by other cars / trucks?
The environment around those roads contains millions of other insects. The amount killed by cars is a tiny percentage. That would obscure any affect from the small increase in automobiles or their windshields.
The last time this was discussed I found some articles showing that the more boxy and angular windows of older vehicles were less likely to have bugs smashed on them. This is why these studies often use license plate splatters to get a better count -- that really hasn't changed.
> some articles showing that the more boxy and angular windows of older vehicles were less likely to have bugs smashed on them
Do you mean "more likely"?
> This is why these studies often use license plate splatters to get a better count -- that really hasn't changed
Do you claim the amount of license plate splatters remains consistent today as, say, 30 years ago, or some other time frame? I think this claim really needs to be sourced, can you produce these studies you allude to? Thanks
No, I absolutely meant "less likely". The bugs don't hit as often against the old vehicles. The older boxy vehicles were more likely to push the insect away, while the modern aerodynamic vehicles allowed the bug to hit the windshield more frequently. I'll see if I can find the study, I don't have it handy at the moment.
As for the license plates, they are no more aerodynamic than they were 30 years ago, which makes them a better source for insect measurement.
> As for the license plates, they are no more aerodynamic than they were 30 years ago, which makes them a better source for insect measurement.
I agree with this, but not the claim that there are studies showing this number is consistent with the past. The linked discussion also seems to imply that sampling rate corresponds with the decline in insect populations, unless I missed something.
I've not said that they (bug splatters) are consistent with the past. Perhaps my wording wasn't the best, but I was trying to say that the aerodynamic properties of a license plate have not changed.
I see, "that really hasn't changed" was a statement on aerodynamics and not volume of insect collisions. Thanks, I agree with what you're saying, good tidbit about the more aerodynamic cars leading to lower probability of insect survival.
"The contemporary rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than the background extinction rate"
"the current rate of extinction is 10 to 100 times higher than in any of the previous mass extinctions in the history of Earth."
"There is widespread consensus among scientists that human activity is accelerating the extinction of many animal species through the destruction of habitats, the consumption of animals as resources, and the elimination of species that humans view as threats or competitors."
This should be obvious. There is some good news in that the human population is plateauing, and is projected to gradually decline, as a result of urbanization, educated women, mass entertainment, secularism, and other influences.
If we want a natural world around us, we have to leave a lot of it natural. Sometimes it reminds us that's not really an option, but a requirement for survival. One thing we will learn from space colonies is that humans cannot thrive in a monoculture surrounded by sterility.
> "the current rate of extinction is 10 to 100 times higher than in any of the previous mass extinctions in the history of Earth."
an accurate statement when there have been a few mass extinction events that were (apparently) caused by sudden changes?
Is this assuming that the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event was caused by gradual changes instead of an impact or volcanic event? Same for the Cretaceous–Tertiary (K–T) extinction? I think there are also a number of extinction pulses in the record that could be attributed to sudden events although I'm unsure of how they compare in terms of the number of species affected.
I recently went back to my hometown in the USA after a couple of decades away. I was struck by how there we're almost none of the fireflies, grasshoppers and assorted other bugs I'd chased as a kid. I chalked it up to being a nostalgic old man, but I've never shaken that feeling that something is definitely not right.
Sad and frightening to hear. Funny though but here in southern Sweden and Denmark I've had the opposite experience.
Sometime around 2018 I started noticing a lot of fireflies, in a park in the middle of a major city. Which was not normal to me. Since then I've noticed them almost every summer.
And on vacation in Denmark it's the same thing, the air is alive with life. It has its downsides too because there are more ticks than ever too.
A lot of cities here have started leaving grassy areas uncut, they just cut a path through it for people to walk on. Also Copenhagen has started building "walls" of twigs, encased in a wire mesh. These walls act as safe havens for all sorts of insects and small creatures.
I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. On hot summer evenings the fireflies were spectacular. The cooler summers of New England meant many fewer fireflies. But, in the past couple of years I have noticed more of them where I now live.
I noticed it in my grandmother's backyard, so that variable was controlled. Then I noticed it pretty much in all my old haunts. Sample size N = 1, etc.
Anecdotal, but I was pleased to see fireflies returning after not seeing them post puberty. Not denying general trends at all but it makes me wonder what is the cause of counter examples. Maybe more neighbors not overgrooming their lawns or the local park's native species garden?
Fireflies (we call them lightning bugs in the south) fluctuate yearly. Some years there are very few of them. It’s always been like that from talking to relatives.
My kids are 10 and 11 and the saw their first grasshopper last summer. They were everywhere when I was a kid. Christmas beetles are a rare find these days. I haven't seen a Bogon moth in years.
Totally anecdotally: I have to scrub a thick layer of bugs off my motorcycle helmet after every single ride but almost never off the windshield of my car. Though this could also be a function of where I’m going (typically rural back roads on the bike and highway/interstate in the car), but even then I’m still not sure, since there is a decent amount of overlap in local routes
They account for this factor, and several others, in the study. There's an world wide decimation of insect populations, and it has received minor coverage relative to its likely significance to ecosystems.
Think of a food chain, bugs are near the bottom meaning they are a food source for many other creatures like birds, reptiles, small mammals, fish. Fewer bugs means less food for mice, that means fewer mice, leads to less food for snakes, leads to fewer snakes, leads to less food for birds of prey, leads to fewer birds of prey.
There are many chains like this where bugs are a vital source of food. If there were zero bugs then these chains would collapse. Also, bugs are needed to pollenate many fruit bearing plants.
I think this is real, I'm traveling and borrowed a relatives car which is much lower profile and more sleek than my old Jeep. I was driving through the countryside the other day and there were a lot of critters flying about, I was surprised that often, they'd sort of just get "pushed" over the top of the car. Not sure what happened to them after that but yeah!
I did some googling to find a comparison of old and new cars in wind tunnels without much luck but this articles cover is fairly good[0].
> Not sure what happened to them after that but yeah!
One thing I did find is that for aerodynamic purposes the one place cars want turbulence is right behind them in their wake to disrupt a vacuum.
So I expect those bugs get smashed into the ground or even sucked into the radiator of any close behind cars as that air seems quite stagnant right behind a car.
Having had a VW bus all my life I can confirm they do get a lot of bugs, but far fewer these days. In the 80s my father used to try all manner of cleaning products to try and remove them but it's not such an issue any more.
Neonicotinoids (pesticide coated seeds) started becoming popular around the same time that bees started mass dying (early 2000s).
AFAIK, the effect of these pesticides on humans is limited, but it's been absolutely devastating for insects.
There is not much profit to be made on insects (aside from bees), so research and bills are getting lobbied into limbo by the big four neonicotinoid companies and agriculture organizations.
I’ve noticed the same with snails. When I was a child in the 90s, the sidewalks were full of snails, and during a 10 minute stroll, I’d often find tens of small snails.
Today I find 1 or 2 snails after rainfall, if at all.
Fireflies for me. I live in Italy and between the vineyards it was full of them. Now I occasionally see one or two. It's a pity not only because it is a concrete sign of habitat degradation, but it was also mesmerizing to walk and have them filing around you. Something my kids won't experience.
Between two long trips to Italy in my childhood, the fireflies we could see from the terrace of a small B&B we stayed at in a small village not far from Genoa is one of my most enduring memories.
You can come here and take away all the snails you want. It's impossible to walk around at night without stepping on them, and they have utterly destroyed my garden. I've never seen a crop of kale or broccoli fail in 30 years until this year.
I'm sure it's a regional impact on different types of creatures. I don't notice windshield bugs but my back patio in the city gets dozens of snails after every rainfall to this day.
I actually don't care at all if an insect lives or dies. Insects do not have emotions; no other insects mourn if one dies. This makes them markedly different from humans and other animals; insects are little more than machines and from a moral perspective much closer to bacteria than, say, mice.
The only reason I care is because of the broader ecological effects. I don't care whether my gut microbes live or die either, if it wasn't for the health effects it would have on me.
I know what you mean. The foundational support beams on my house are starting to rot away. I don't care how they feel, but I hope my house stays upright.
Ants also have a complex range of psychological responses. (Not sure I'd call them "emotions" since we're obviously too distantly related to them to have a meaningful reference here, but whatever.)
Ants have very interesting learning behaviour, but I don't think you can really say they're "smarter" than a mouse, or even "intelligent" (depending on your exact definition of that). You can teach a computer English better than the average human (see e.g. Grammarly), but that does not make the computer smarter. The learning behaviour of ants is certainly amazing, but very limited in scope.
Ants can response to their environment, but are they even "psychological responses" or just a piece of machinery responding in a pre-programmed way? When I played the Sims 20 years ago my characters would respond in certain pre-programmed ways. None of can truly know what it's like to be an ant, but given the tiny size of their brains compared to higher animals I think it's fair to say the machinery for any kind of emotion just isn't there.
> or just a piece of machinery responding in a pre-programmed way?
Is a mouse responding in a pre-programmed way? I'd say you're just showing mammalian bias here.
> given the tiny size of their brains compared to higher animals I think it's fair to say the machinery for any kind of emotion just isn't there
First of all, a whale isn't necessarily smarter than a monkey just because it has a much bigger (physically) brain. Secondly, an individual ant really isn't, because genetically the ant colony is a single unit.
All life is to some level – including your and me – but that doesn't mean there aren't distinctions.
> a whale isn't necessarily smarter than a monkey just because it has a much bigger (physically) brain
I claimed that brain size is deterministic of intelligence, but it's not as if any brain of any size can do anything; there are real physical limits here. Ant brains are tiny, and ants are probably the smartest insects: others have even smaller brains.
Either way, I'm mostly interested in the emotional experience of insects and other animals, rather than intelligence. I think that's a more important factor in deciding whether inflicting harm is morally acceptable or not.
Mice, of course, are also not especially clever or have rich emotional lives in the same way that a dog or pig might have, but there does seem to be some of it, whereas I'm not seeing any in ants or other insects.
I keep an ant colony as a pet.
Ants are pretty much indestructible creatures from a physical point of view - they need infinitesimal amounts of food and water to survive, they don't get sick or hurt, but they're very succeptible to stress. They're nervous creatures and go nuts from stress, acting in illogical and even suicidal ways.
Is it because their primitive brains go haywire? Or is this just our mammalian prejudice speaking? Who knows.
Probably best not to anthropomorphize any animal, I think.
Insect populations are declining in places like New England and the upper midwest despite farming both declining and finding more efficient ways to use fertilizer and pesticides on the same timeline.
If we're going down the road of human introduced chemical toxins (like pesticide pollution) I think a fair bit of blame also deserves to be laid at the feet of the state (and by proxy voters) for poisoning the soil immediately adjacent to roads (and to a slightly lesser degree, the watersheds) with various salts.
Aside from pesticides and land development, yet another cause of decline is our over obsession with landscaping and municipal lights (at least here in the Northeast US).
I have mixed feelings about this: Night lights do add a bit of security, but insects such as moths rely on natural darkness and moonlight to navigate.
> Night lights do add a bit of security, but insects such as moths rely on natural darkness and moonlight to navigate.
We can have a bit of compromise, at least if we had dark sky compliant lights there would be a lot less of an issue. Where I live the streetlights seem to intentionally point upward and it's frustrating that this isn't a priority even when refiting them with LEDs (at least here they put in warm lights instead of cool ones like where I used to live).
> another cause of decline is our over obsession with landscaping and municipal lights
Very much unlike their incandescent and florescent predecessors, LED lights emit practically no ultraviolet wavelengths, and therefore have a drastically reduced attractive effect on insects. Whatever effect outdoor lighting may have on insects, should be showing precipitous declines over the past several years, as LEDs have become the dominant artificial light source.
Insects are most attracted to UV, but they’re attracted to most of the visible (to human) spectrum.
Just less so, which is why the recommendation is to use “warm” led to minimize insect attraction.
Also, light usage hasn’t remained constant. LED’s lower power usage means that it enables more lighting, including solar powered (day charged) landscaping lights.
So whereas owners would formerly only have one or two lights at low watts before, the reduced energy usage means that they sprinkle in another magnitude more with LED.
I bought my first motorcycle in 2004 and my 2nd in 2007. I rode 45k km with the first one over these 3 years (mostly on my island) and 80k km with the 2nd one between 2007-2015. I can confirm that the amount of bugs crashing on my helmet's visor is definitely less. I used to clean it after riding for an hour but now I can do 4-5-6h and still have no real need to clean it.
Regarding all the anecdotes, I would have said the same thing 8 years ago when I moved to my current house in suburban Minneapolis. Then we had some landscaping done and added a bunch of planting beds to the otherwise boring grass-only yard. And my kids threw some milkweed seeds on a slope that is too steep to mow. Now we've got tons of bumblebees, honey bees, monarch butterflies, and other insects. I think the range of most insects is quite small, so maybe people who miss the bugs just need to plant a bit more in their yards :).
Second point: the windshield splats proxy is too confounded to be useful. Use actual measurements or reasonable people will discount the claims (as I have done).
I wonder if it's some introduced wide spectrum insect pathogen. Sort of like that fungus that's devastating amphibians around the world? If so, the part of the world that pathogen came from would not be seeing these declines, since the insects there would have long before evolved to deal with it (as amphibians in SE Asia, I think it was, apparently have done with that fungus.)
I was thinking about this lack of bugs phenomenon when driving to my mom's house a few times over the past 3 or so months. It hasn't been the case for me this year. My car is covered with dead bugs, more than there used to be ~10 years ago. While I was there, I walked around at night (in a small midwestern town), and was constantly assaulted by bugs. Is pesticide use down with fertilizer use?
I have a similar anecdote. I had to make a 5 hour drive this weekend up to Raleigh, NC, and for the first time in years, my windshield was dotted with bugs.
I remember a drive from Devils Lake, ND to Rugby, ND (~60 miles) less than a decade ago. The bugs were so bad I had to stop and clean my windshield twice because I couldn't see.
Probably a large part is due to the increased frequency of cars inside broadly the same volume of road space. Assuming that you have the same number of bugs per m^3 and the same number of bugs entering per m^3 per minute as before, then bugs splattered per car will change in inverse proportion to cars per minute.
I think you grossly overestimate how much space does car infrastructure hold in relation to literally millions of km^2 of free space around it. Assuming your observation is right its impact would be minuscule.
But we're not discussing the free space around roads, I'm talking about the width of the road X length of road X 2.5m where the bugs get splatted. If there are more cars travelling in that space, fewer bugs will be splatted by each car even if the level overall remains the same.
I see what you mean. This still seems far fetched especially when taking into account rural and remote places where even doubling the traffic would mean passing 1 car every 10 minutes.
An Occam's razorish answer is that there are fewer bugs nowadays in whatever area this phenomenon is observed. So a better question could be why are there fewer bugs?
I can only comment on my neighborhood in the south SF bay area. Given that the region is a former home to orchards it doesn't surprise me that there is a lack of insects, but given the amount of trees/greenery vs my old SoCal neighborhood I can say that there is a startling lack of bugs here, with the exception of cockroaches(several varieties are disturbingly plentiful on the sidewalks at night), isopods/woodlice/pill bugs, and black widow spiders. Going on hikes in the Santa Cruz mountains, it also seemed like there were a shortage of insect life compared to hikes in SoCal.
Although indoor vertical farming is going to be super expensive, it does have the possibility of huge benefits such as reducing contamination to the environment.
I like the idea of using genetic engineering to knock out certain species of pest, limited to the ones specialized to eat domesticated crops. You wouldn’t need to spray a cornfield if the corn moth was no longer around.
And, we could always keep a pristine population of the peat locked away in some vault if it turns out making them extinct in the wild was a bad idea.
This is terrible and makes me think of the unknown consequences that may occur from the death of an insect species, who knows.
Side note: recently moved to the northeast and it has been fascinating seeing the city collectively come together to kill an invasive bug species. You will witness an adult randomly stomping on the corner of the street. I wish we had the same energy when it came to protecting existing bugs.
Let me guess, the Spotted Lanternfly? They are all over here (SE PA).
It was entertaining watching the old man (easily 85+) from my neighborhood walking around with a broom brushing them off trees and smashing them with his walker.
Mark Hostetler's analysis of North American windshield splatters in 1997 is documented in his book, "That Gunk on Your Car: A Unique Guide to Insects of North America." He reports on two dozen types of insects, with photos of them splattered and intact. His work won the 1997 Ig Nobel Prize for entomology [1].
No time to read a whole book? Hostetler's son, Bryce, released a free iPhone/iPad app in 2018 [2].
I guess whatever reason it is local, because last summer drove from Lisbon to Berlin and this summer drove from Berlin to Milan and every time I stopped at a gas station I had to clean the car because boy did it have A LOT of dead bugs.
Completely anecdotal, but this does seem to be a North American issue, I did a two week roadtrip through Croatia this year and I had to stop just to clean bugs off the car more often than stopping just for gas. I've done quite a few roadtrips in America and never once had to stop just to clean bugs off the windshield.
It's possible that it's happening more in NA, but the article started with a research made on Denmark roads 1996-2017 with a 80-97% fall of insect splats in the period.
Anecdotally, I hardly had to clean my windscreen when I was living in a city. I'm living in a small town with fields all around it now and I never have a clean windscreen anymore. However nothing like the one in the first picture of the article. That's how my front license plate looks like.
Yeah, I do quite a lot of road trips and that is always a pain. Thankfully all gas stations even have the bucket of water and the scraper to clean off the bugs.
This study is useless. All it can tell us is: The number of insects flying above two particular roadways in one country over the course of 2 decades has declined by about 90%.
We can wildly speculate about what this means. Is it genetically-modified crops? Is it climate change? Is it changes to our automobiles? Is it population density changes? Are the bugs increasing elsewhere to compensate? etc. Has something about roads in Denmark changed? Is this part of a larger cycle within Denmark?
This is concerning because if it's affecting worms too, then it's not just airborne bugs landing on crops with insecticide. It means it's already soaked into the soil.
Anecdotally, my 25-year-old Range Rover, and the 10-year-old Landrover Defender (which hasn't changed its basic shape since the 1950s) we have at work pick up just as many bugs as cars did in the 1970s.
The modern, sleek, aerodynamic cars we have don't pick up any bugs at all.
Author lives in DC and apparently hasn't been anywhere else. I have noticed more bees, wasps, hoverflies, mosquitos, katydids and a host of other insects, more so than ever.
We’ve had a couple polar vortexes that sat over us for a few days. Those temps tend to kill off a large number of bugs. Then it’s been drier than normal and I mowed back the long grasses that abut the property all of which reduced the bugs.
I once saw a video of a highly aerodynamic solar car. Due to the high laminar flow of the air around it bugs would just go around the car. Perhaps this also causes modern cars to splatter less bugs.
Recently I was driving an old car and got lots of bugs. So maybe it’s just that every modern car has been designed with wind tunnel and the bugs simply miss the windshield.
Scary thing is how many people don't consider this to be scary.
If we were to blame anyone, we should blame ourselves. But I'll return to that in a moment.
We live in a complex system, so we can blame the political/financial system for providing wrong incentives, loans and subsidies to the big agriculture, based on profitability alone.
We can blame agriculture companies for sprayng millions of tons of poisons all over our countryside to keep profits up and costs down. When you're planting monocrops, and spraying it with pesti/herbicides, you're propagating environmental equivalents of deserts. Deserts leaking poisons not only on itself, but through whole nature (through wind & water cycle).
Both pesticides and herbicides are inbelievably poisonous not only to plants and pests, but also to other bugs (we all know at least about bees), to all other animals, the animals we feed with the produce, and in the end, even to humans. Those poisons' bioaccumulate and their neurodegenerative and hormons-altering effects are causing havoc not only in bugs, frogs and mice, but also in humans (parkinson, etc.).
The solution is something we're actively killing with our current agricultural practices. Biodiversity.
For example, we don't need to kill the mice with poisons. We can interplant trees into our fields to provide living space for predators (e.g. owls and foxes) to manage the mice population and not use the poisons to keep those predators alive.
We can't reasonably expect the return of an army of small farmers, providing local communities with poison-free grown food, not in a reasonable time frame we have until environmental collapse and/or extinction of key animal kinds (no pollinators, no birds, no small predators, more mice, more bad bugs and diseases, famines ...).
But what we can do, we can change our habits. We don't have to eat meat/dairy, which is incredibly land/resource/poison intensive (we would need 4+ earths to feed the world's population same diet as americans have). We don't have to feed other animal 20x more food than we would need only to eat its muscles. We don't have to cut down forests to grow meat (we would need 1/4 of the land to feed the population if everybody were to switch to a plant based diet), if we eat the plants ourselves and let the nature be and let it repair itself.
We can then change the political/financial/agricultural system through our own actions (buying/cooking/eating). When enough people do, there won't be the pressure to produce a much as we currently do, then we can legislate the change in the agriculture , forbid use of poisons, protect the ecosystems, reforest the earth, live in sync with the nature, stop exploiting everything (and living beings) with our need for financial gains.
Sorry for my bad english. Also, I'm in the system, it's monday, no time to write shorter comment, and no time to incorporate everything-that-is-wrong and everything-that-should-be-done. It's a complex system. But it can be solved in our own kitchens.
This isn't true. When I go out to the countryside my windshield gets very dirty. And by countryside I mean just up the road from here, about 40 minutes out.
My car was covered with bugs after a recent trip, but hard to say if that anecdata is any indication of actual insect population stability. If insect populations are truly in decline, it is hard to see how insecticides used on crops could be responsible for massive worldwide reductions.
Here is an interesting breakdown of how much of the world's surface (particularly the part that includes habitable land) is used to grow crops: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use (TLDR: it is a very small percentage)
this is not my experience in new england, where i can't even stand out in my backyard without getting swarmed with all variety of insects, and my truck is absolutely plastered from them, even though its been cold for a month now
It's partly due to mowing alongside highways and medians. That is primarily motivated by keeping the number of small animals down, reducing fire risk, and other reasons, but fewer tall grasses means drastically fewer bugs. Also, pesticides and general global insect decline. This is not primarily due to aerodynamics.
It's smart to keep it maintained for safety reasons, but that doesn't explain the full story - there's bound to be plenty of unkempt grassland and whatnot further away from the road where insect populations SHOULD be thriving.
It's partly due to mowing alongside highways and medians. ... fewer tall grasses means drastically fewer bugs
This is way too general: in some countries and alongside specific highways, the state of grasslands is actually really good. Like: good enough to grow rare orchids and having >10 or >20 plant species/square meter. Because of correct mowing regimes for that vegetation type.
It also lacks nuance because as explained in another comment already: not mowing at all can make things worse. Which brings us to the tall grasses: meadows featuring a lot of tall grasses but hardly any other flowering plants have can have much less insects that meadows with a coverage of only like 20% grasses where the rest is taken by a diversity of flowering plants.
I can attest that. I drive a Land Rover Defender which, you know, has the aerodynamics of a wall. It's full of bugs after driving on the highway for more than 30 minutes.
Sadly, also in Denmark as the article mentions, I’ve only had to clean my windshield once this summer (by clean I mean scrubbing, I do use the windshield washer more often). 1995 Defender.
I only have to look outside at my neighbors winter wheat field to find one of the reasons. It’s been sprayed 3 times already this fall after sowing.
Are you from the US? Never thought anyone would drive them over there because they tend to need repairs quite often and not every shop wants to work on them. And also the thing with the spare parts.
Yeah. I bought mine because it was half the price of a similar year 4runner or similar. I ended up getting rid of it for the reasons you state, but had a blast with it while I had it.
haha, had to be the reason. I would also love a 4Runner, love the look. But the mileage and the eletronics, apart from the fact that they aren't sold in Germany make it nearly impossible.
The new Defenders are awesome. I got to borrow one for the day from a buddy in Colorado and it was the ideal vehicle for the terrain. My only qualm was that the turbo lag felt pretty significant but it scoots once it's all spooled up. Very luxurious and very capable vehicles.
Yeah, agreed. Very capable and probably better than the old ones. But I like my old one because it has almost no tech and I can easily fix things even in Mongolia or something. No computers needed!
> Many smart people we spoke with, including entomologists and wheat farmers, speculated that maybe the cars have changed, not the bugs. As vehicles become more aerodynamic, the thinking goes, their increasingly efficient airflow whisks the bugs away from the windshield instead of creating head-on splatters.
> But when we called experts in the arcane art of computational fluid dynamics, they sounded skeptical. Yes, today’s sleek sedans can have half the drag of the land boats that ruled the road just a generation or two ago. But that improved airflow won’t do much for a bug.
> For starters, many aero improvements happen on the rear of the car rather than the bug-hitting front. Consider the optimally aerodynamic teardrop shape, with its blunt, round front and long, sleek tail. But more importantly, it’s just surprisingly difficult to use air to push a bug out of the way of an onrushing Buick.
> If it were possible to design a bug- and debris-proof car, then Kevin Golsch probably would have done it by now. An auto-industry veteran, Golsch has spent decades around wind tunnels, both real and simulated, and is now vice president for strategic fluid design and simulation at Altair, a global tech company that makes simulation and AI software. Altair’s customers include massive automakers that would be thrilled if airflow could protect both windshields and the delicate sensors on self-driving cars.
> “From an aerodynamic standpoint, I’ve done a lot of studies on contamination of sensors, especially for autonomous vehicles,” Golsch said. “And I think most everybody’s given up on trying to influence what happens at the vehicle level for dust and particles and rain.”
> Consider raindrops. They’re about the size and weight of a larger insect, but nobody thinks fewer raindrops hit our windshields these days. Any forces that cleared our windshield of bugs would presumably do the same for rain and road debris, Golsch said.
> To be sure, one element of modern auto design could be reducing bug spatter. Windshields today often have a lower slope than the more-vertical front windows of yesteryear, and while the broader shift to SUVs and trucks with bigger, steeper windshields will negate some of that, it might reduce splats for people who are driving similar vehicles.
> “If the windshield was laid back slightly more than another windshield, that bug may have a chance of just skipping off and going up over the windshield rather than hitting the windshield,” Golsch said. “It might be a glancing blow at the last second rather than a splat.”
> But we also saw 60 percent declines in insects between 2004 and 2021 in a British study from the Kent Wildlife Trust, which built on a Royal Society for the Protection of Birds effort in which thousands of people used “splatometers” to measure bug splatters on license plates, which aren’t much affected by aerodynamic advances elsewhere.
>These were normally brown like tree bark but evolved to look like sooty brick in a few years.
Because the brown ones got eaten. But that's different from evolving to recognize where a road is, which is maybe possible but probably would take thousands or millions of years.
> So in our little thought experiment, (...), our bugs-per-windshield metric would have been cut by two-thirds even if the number of bugs had remained constant. And it hasn’t! It’s fallen precipitously.
This could also be a function of bugs flying less over busy roads, and decreasing in volume at the places where most cars drive. If so, that would explain the precipitous fall in splats. I do not think that this is very far-fetched, since most animals instinctively begin to shun areas when predators are introduced.
Swallows. That and the fact wild animal populations swing widely to extremes sometimes. I have been paying close attention to swallows in recent few years and the numbers of them as well as the bugs they eat are skyrocketing in my area. When I moved to the area it was essentially empty field a couple hundred meters from anything. The farmer owning it converted a bit in the middle into residential building plots, a road was built, electricity hooked up etc. Most of the people that buy those plots do it as an investment so they don't do anything to them. I have observed over last 10 years how nature took over those plots. Hay that grows and is not mowed accumulates and besides being a fire hazard provides an environment for birds to nest in. Wild trees have grown to the point one wouldn't recognise it was a field a decade ago. I regularly have hedgehogs, hares, deer, lots of all kinds of birds (including a golden Eagle once). Every year there are huge numbers of swallows come in the spring. As of last 2 years there have been moose and even wild wolves. Yes, wolves, in a middle of Europe in 2022. I have photos of their dinner I once found in addition to other info.
People don't realise nature is very resilient and it will move into every area that is not polluted with toxins. Even with toxins or radiation (like the famous Chernobyl exclusion zone) nature evolves to deal with it.
Butterflies: 50% reduction in 50 years. Beetles: 75% decline since 1985. Ladybugs: 50% reduction in 20 years. Across the border in Germany: a 75% decline in flying insects since 1989.
It doesn't take much of a scientist to see the trend. I've been hiking the forests here multiple times per week for 20 years. You can clearly see how some groups are disappearing whilst others remain.
There's several root causes but the primary one is a lack of native plant diversity. Since agriculture over here is done in close proximity to forests, the soil becomes acid due to the nitrogen disposition. This benefits the growth of a handful of plants at the expense of all others. In some of our forests, the soil is now so acid that snails no longer develop a case and bird eggs collapse.
In this plant monoculture, insects depending on a specific host plant disappear. Outside (protected) forests, things aren't much better. Even the tiniest of strips of grass that would normally produce wildflowers, are aggressively mowed down. People's gardens are designed to be as hostile to insects as is possible.
Secondary reasons are invasive species and light pollution.
It's a sad state of affairs and one we should be deeply ashamed of. We're not talking about some iconic predator requiring hundreds of acres of wild forest just to survive. We're talking about insects that require little space, healthy soil, a flower, and for it to be left alone. We can't even offer that.