When I talk about the environment I usually say “Climate change & Environmental Degradation.” It’s important to understand that while these two reinforce each other, they aren’t the same thing.
A UK-wide decline in bug splats recorded on car number plates indicates an “alarming” fall in the number of flying insects, UK scientists said in a survey published yesterday.
The 2024 Bugs Matter report revealed the numbers of flying insects found stuck to vehicle number plates had dropped by nearly 63 per cent since 2021.
This study from Germany in 2017 found a:
More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas
And there were decreases in the 1900s as well. Bug biodiversity and biomass is WAY down. Here’s a lovely chart from 2019.
We’re seeing this sort of crash, in both biodiversity and biomass for all sorts of species, not just bugs. Problem is that our food production and a pile of environmental processes related to water and atmosphere renewal are dependent on animals and plants. There’s massive loss of plankton, mammals, reptiles, bacteria in our soil and so on.
This stuff isn’t independent of climate change, but even without any climate change there’d still be plenty of it. The loss of wild areas, plus tons of pollution and the side effects of extraction and energy generation are largely to blame.
Collapse of this “web of life” or “food web” is a huge danger to us, as well as being a monstrous crime against other forms of life.
So don’t think “climate change is it”. It isn’t, and it may not even be as important as loss of biodiversity.
marku52
That’s Gibson’s “Jackpot” from The Peripheral. It wasn’t any one thing, it was just a whole lot of stuff, climate change, epidemics, antibiotic resistant bacteria, crop failures.
Gibson is ahead of his time, but not by much.
bruce wilder
General in effect. General in cause.
Human production/consumption exceeds the assimilation capacity of the planet’s ecologies.
Every use of energy generates waste, with the surety of a natural law. (Maybe because it is a natural law.)
We can mix our poisons, but considered altogether, there is no sane alternative to reducing the total by reducing the total use of energy in production. By radical conservation in other words. By constraints on energy use. All energy use.
Electrification and “renewable” “clean” energy are illusions and self-deceptions. We are not going to be able to solve our climate change and ecology and resource depletion problems one-by-one by switching sources, certainly not without radical constraints on marginal applications of energy and conservation.
Acceleration of economic growth and technological change ought to be major concerns. As more of the world has advanced to the bleeding edge of capitalist innovation, the sheer scale of resource consumption has ballooned almost beyond comprehension. And, the rate at which new chemicals and electronics diffuse to that increased global scale reduces the time available to discover adverse effects and consequences. Our techno-optimism is a deadly peril. Consider the precedent of lead in gasoline, the effects of which were confirmed almost by accident and remedied while automobiles were still a perk of only a “small” population compared to the couple of billion at least involved in automotive gasoline transport today.
As another example of the risks of hidden dangers in our breakneck pace, diffusion of the “original” plain old telephone service from its invention around 1876 took more than 50 years in just the United States. Each generation of cellular communications by contrast has rolled out in less than the span of a human generation and across much more vast territories and populations. And, yes, the radiation does cause rare brain tumors.
We humans collectively have not thought these problems through thoroughly enough to be able to devise a consensus about what to do or how to do those things. The thinking we have done collectively has mostly been hijacked by denial and wishful thinking and virtue-signaling and complacent delay. Probably one should add the conceits of the naïvely clever. These are altogether both very difficult problems for humans to fully grasp the nature of, even at a high level of a abstraction and, importantly, very difficult problems for humans, with their scheming sociality, to organize and sustain constraints sufficient to “solve”. We are nothing if not self-destructive in our collective scorn for constraints on violence and greed and betrayal in other contexts and equally prone to reactionary stupidity when constraints are successfully imposed on enterprise and non-conformity.
GrimJim
Our little mixed use building (two apartments, two office suites, one store front) used to be rife with spiders and centipedes, but nary another bug in sight, as they ate every trespasser
The open field behind us, on the other hand, was always filled with butterflies and other insects. It gave off continuous chirping in the summer months.
Now, we rarely see any spiders or centipedes inside… but also, no other bugs. And the field behind us is dead and empty.
DMC
I remember a few years back when I first heard the 75% decline number, I was deeply shocked. Thats knocking a lot of blocks out of the pyramid and the effects were apt to be catastrophic. There’s been less than adequete coverage since, focusing mostly on pollinators like bees but thats just one obvious issue. Insects are so ubiquetous and fill so many ecological niches that we can only guess what will happen when particular populations hit critical levels.
mago
This morning while tossing out a bucket of gray water I looked up at the porch light sconce upon which is perched a bird’s nest. Every year at the beginning of bug season the same family comes to nest.
And I thought a few more weeks and they’ll arrive. And that set off a whole chain of thoughts about animal intelligence and the interdependence of the natural world.
All of the factors Ian cites played through my mind from toxic landscapes to increasing lack of biodiversity and species impact and how much we’re dependent on the insect world. It’s not just the birds.
And I went back inside thinking it’s just possible that my bird friends won’t be returning this year. . .
Everything seems so fragile, tenuous and precarious these days in so many ways. Anyway, thanks once again Ian.
Purple Library Guy
Biodiversity and simple biomass. If you’re talking about fisheries, say, we could carefully conserve tons of species of fish, but if there’s only one small school of each we’re not going to be getting much protein from fishing. We need lots of ecosystem stuff, just in raw amounts, to keep the planet working.
Bob
To say the least.
It’s all so heartbreaking, so many animals and plants and ecosystems destroyed for nothing.
Hardly any humans want to acknowledge reality.
someofparts
Mass extinctions are triggered when one species becomes too dominant and throws the ecological web into imbalance. I think the impending extinction event will be the sixth one. The planet will be fine. Humans, no so much.
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