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75% decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas (plos.org)
901 points by kawera on Oct 18, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 432 comments



It's not only a consequence of direct habitat destruction, but also the use of pesticides. According to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2946087/, more than a billion pounds of pesticides are used on lawns in the US every year. There is little regulation there.

All of those pesticides are designed to kill bugs. Why are we now surprised that bugs are disappearing?

We are sterilizing the planet.

According to this (http://www.beyondpesticides.org/assets/media/documents/lawn/...), we use up to 3.5x more pesticides per acre on suburban lawns than on agriculture.


I don't get it. Who cares if there's bugs in your grass?

I used to play with bugs in the yard as a kid.


My step-father has this weird obsession with keeping a perfectly flat green lawn as a front yard. Any time an ant-hill springs up it's out with the pesticide. Any weeds that pop up are immediately exterminated. It's this sort of stupidity on a global scale that's causing the problem. For a lot of middle-class America, a sterile grass mono-culture is the ideal for a front yard, environmental health be damned.


Right, if you're that obsessed with perfection, just pave over the damn thing. I only kill ants if they're building nests that threaten something else, like a tree. Usually though, that's a good indication the tree is already sick. I'm nursing one back to health, hopefully, now that had an ant colony at it's base.

I let moss, and local vegetation that grows fairly small thrive in my yard. In some ways, I prefer the moss to my grass.

I do fog my yard, so guilty, but I live in area densely populated with mosquitos which are a problem and they have plenty of wooded areas nearby to thrive if they want. But yeah, if there was some way to be selective, I'd be all for it, but it's not worth 20 mosquito bites when I go outside for 30 minutes to keep bees around.

Maybe if I could hire a service to do this: http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/07/health/zika-virus-sterile-mosq...

Granted I imagine that's not something I could do without having to get EPA or fish and wildlife approval.


Well, ticks like grass (or at least breed in lawns) and some tickborne diseases are pretty bad.


By that logic we should steralize the planet of all mamalian life, since rats carry some pretty bad disease.


"Some people don't like ticks on their lawn so they use pesticides"

"By that logic we should steralize the planet of all mamalian life, since rats carry some pretty bad disease."

Uhhh, what happened here...? I've heard some atrocious analogies before but this almost seems like a joke.


No, by that logic, I understand why some people use pesticides to get rid of disease-carrying ticks from the lawn where their children and pets play daily.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25280366

https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/stats/index.html


>use pesticides to get rid of disease-carrying ticks

Unfortunately this solution is a bit like using a nuclear bomb to get rid of gang violence. It does indeed do that, but at the expense of destroying the entire beneficial insect community as well.

Generally pest species recover faster after catastrophe than beneficial species, so by eliminating all of the pest's competitors pesticides are sewing the seeds of future infestations.

A much better, less toxic, and longer-lasting solution would be to provide pest-eating insect predators with habitats. In nature balance is achieved by predator/prey interactions instead of razing the beneficial soil ecosystem[1] with poison.

To take just one example, ticks are naturally eaten by birds (eg chickens), and if productive bird species can be used this has the side effect of producing delicious chicken (vs surface water/aquifer pollution, soil degradation which necessitates fertilizers, and a proliferation of plastic "keep children and pets off this lawn for X hours" signs).

People's instinct to protect themselves from disease-carrying pest species is a good one. The solutions handed to them by the post-war chemical industry are not. Who coulda thunk that redirecting all our WWII chemical weapons output to fighting nature wasn't such a good idea after all?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag


By your response it looks like you assumed I thought using pesticides were a good idea. I only said I understood why people might choose to. It wasn't an endorsement.


Great point. Thanks for clarifying.


We have some nasty bugs here in Texas. Fire ants, scorpions, asps, and many other pain inducing critters. My wife, from Kansas City, had no idea when we moved here...


Because bugs play an important role in keeping ecosystems healthy.


I believe he was questioning why people feel the need to eliminate bugs from their grass. Not why anyone should care if there are no bugs in their grass.


That's an interesting fact, but is there any scientific studies showing that retail pesticide use is why the insect population has declined so much?

We all love to feel guilty about our consumerism and personal choices but this study showing a 75% decline was done entirely in Germany and controlled for habitats.


Well this study hasn't definitively isolated pesticides as a cause, but it did successfully eliminate a large number of alternative explanations, making agricultural pesticides a likely contributor. Whether consumer pesticides contribute is also an open question, but it makes a lot of sense. They're designed to kill these insects, so widespread application is a reasonable hypothesis for the decline in insect populations. It's functionally habitat loss, which is well established as a cause of population decline in other animal populations. The theory especially makes sense when you consider the particular areas covered by this study.

The authors looked at flying insect populations in various protected areas in Germany, where pesticides are not applied directly and thus are not impacting populations locally. But since those populations are so mobile, the surrounding areas' pesticide levels certainly could be. Many of Germany's protected areas are surrounded by developed land, doubly so for those covered in this study. Most of the data collection occurred in Nordrhein-Westfalen, which is landlocked and surrounded by one of the most heavily industrialized and intensively farmed regions in the world. The rest took place in Brandenburg, which is similar. They're also not wide open plains like much of the American agricultural heartland, where insects can blow through more rapidly.

So, maybe we would see less decline in America, where there are much wider swathes of undeveloped land. That wouldn't disprove the pesticide hypothesis, it could merely indicate that the blocks of pesticide-free land in Germany are too small to form a sustainable habitat for flying insects. That would mean we need to create larger blocks of pesticide free land.

Maybe that doesn't mean we need to stop using pesticides, but does mean we need to reconsider the scope of their use. Deprioritizing non-essential uses such as lawn maintenance, for example.


Per acre doesn't seem like the right metric.


This article (http://scienceline.org/2011/07/lawns-vs-crops-in-the-contine...) is about water usage, but it states that there is more lawn acreage in the US than the 8 top irrigated crops combined.

(Discussed here: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/lawn-largest-crop-ameri...) (original here: http://www.isprs.org/proceedings/XXXVI/8-W27/milesi.pdf)


This article seems very misleading, at least for California.

If you look at aggregate water usage for California agriculture uses 4X "urban" and "urban" includes industrial, golf courses, parks, etc.

So even if lawns are using more area they are much less water intensive than agriculture.

http://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/


the majority of usage goes towards power generation (https://water.usgs.gov/edu/wateruse-total.html). urban areas consume the power, but they dont produce it. they hide their water usage in the rural areas.


Looking at that data it appears that a majority of California's water for power generation is coming from salinated sources, so at least for California the largest user of fresh water sources is still irrigation (agriculture).

Either way, the point that agriculture takes a lot more water than people watering their lawns still stands.


The right metric would be per hectare, indeed :-)


Some EU countries banned agro chemicals for general public. Now it's only for license bearers - farmers mostly.


Yes. This is a case of hard data confirming what we already know. As in - few types of butterflies I used to like, and see yearly as a kid - are gone. I see them now once in 5 years, if lucky. I bring my kids to look because it's a first time for them.

On the other hand, some types of beetles, ants, flies, mosquitoes, even wasps - are just new. They were not here 20-30 years ago. Now, what are the consequences of all that... I kind of feel we'll find out sooner than we'd like.


This is making the headlines in Germany right now:

http://www.zeit.de/wissen/umwelt/2017-10/insektensterben-flu...

http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/natur/insekten-in-deutsch...

http://www.sueddeutsche.de/wissen/insektensterben-dramatisch...

Der Spiegel discusses issues in the methodology of the data collection. The intervals over the years weren't uniform, data was collected by volunteers/hobbyists and they did not measure the dry mass weight. There are differing opinions whether or not those issues have relevance.

SZ gives some details on suspected causes. Neither climate change (warmer weather should yield more insects, not less) nor changes in plant diversity can explain the observed effects alone. Main suspects:

- agricultural fertilizers, especially nitrogen

- pesticides, especially neonicotinoides


It's worth noting that data was collected by amateurs in the sense that they're doing this on their spare time but some of them are highly regarded in their field. Quote from http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/where-have-all-insect...

    Members of the Krefeld society have been observing, 
    recording, and collecting insects from the region—and
    around the world—since 1905. Some of the roughly 50 
    members—including teachers, telecommunication 
    technicians, and a book publisher—have become world 
    experts on their favorite insects. Siegfried Cymorek, 
    for instance, who was active in the society from the 
    1950s through the 1980s, never completed high school. 
    He was drafted into the army as a teenager, and after 
    the war he worked in the wood-protection division at a 
    local chemical plant. But because of his extensive 
    knowledge of wood-boring beetles, the Swiss Federal 
    Institute of Technology in Zurich awarded him an 
    honorary doctorate in 1979. Over the years, members 
    have written more than 2000 publications on insect 
    taxonomy, ecology, and behavior.


Just speculating wildly and looking at Sweden, for example meadows have more or less disappeared since 30-40 years. I mean flowering meadows, not pastures for grazing.

The meadows have been turned into forests and to a lesser extent pastures.

It's not a few percent, it's 30% of the land, probably more in Germany where there are much lest forests than in Sweden.

The bio-diversity in a meadow strikes me as much higher than heavily grazed pastures or a mono-culture wheat fields or pine forest.


Not sure if this is case in Sweden, but here in the US the reforestation is actually a return to the natural state. Much of the country was logged repeatedly in the last few centuries. Modern sustainable logging and the transition to other energy sources is resulting in the land returning to the endless forest it was before settlers arrived.

This is mostly clearly seen on the east coast because most of the Midwest is still used for farming.

Edit: in Europe this is visible in coppiced forests. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppicing . Haven't seen one here in the US but I assume they're somewhat common in Europe where they were an early and effective method of sustainable forestry.


US forest management is definitely more wild than I've seen in Germany, but it's not always necessarily a return to natural state. For example, in many parts of the country, reforestation meant planting pine monocultures where there were previously diverse old-growth forests or savannas. People look at these monoculture forests and think they are "the way things used to be", when in reality they are nothing but a shadow of the kinds of biodiversity that was destroyed.

Something that bothers me is the gristly, meager attitude of a certain type of conservation ecology. I think we are really going to start having to cultivate healthy ecosystems from the ground up, regardless of who's originally "from here" or not. I'm very optimistic about permaculture and wild cultivation techniques. I think they deserve more of a shot than people often give them.

And that "ag-tech" oligopoly has gotta go, along with its foolish, ignorant, exploitative approaches to ecology and economics alike.


The industrial forests of Sweden is nothing like a 'natural' state, and I don't think we even know what a natural state would look like since people have been around since the ice age.

But the case in point was that the countryside has changed considerably because of changes in agriculture.


It seems like a lot of American logging has pushed to the Pacific Northwest, where it's very wet, doesn't get very hot/cold and new growth is very fast. I was talking to someone in Portland out in the middle of nowhere who said, "Almost everything you see is new growth; less than 60 years old. It grows that fast." The Singapore City gallery had a display where they talked about growing plants sustainability for paper.


It may grow fast, bug the pacific north west once was covered with HUGE trees. Those trees may seem normal, but they are small in comparison to how things "normally" looked before Europeans. https://www.google.cz/search?q=spruce+giants+olympic&source=...


Yep - PNW forestry is a fairly reasonable solution, at least in the sense that it's sustainable as-is. But it's far from a natural condition for that area.

The comparison between relatively preserved parks and National Forests (e.g. Willamette) and the rest of the states forests is truly jarring.

For that matter, the same pattern can be seen across the country. Much of Pennsylvania is densely forested, but the entire state has only a few thousand scattered acres of old-growth woods.


Yup, Fat growing pulpwood is what they use. 20-40 year cycle. http://forums2.gardenweb.com/discussions/1634930/is-the-larg...

Weyerhaeuser, etc. grow those fast growing pulpwood trees and harvest.


Sounds like they may have been referring to the Tillamook Burn. Also, I doubt it was you, but this reminds me of a conversion on Saddle Mtn that happened to be right while the Eagle Creek fire was starting.


I think the point was made at the end of the previous post that pine (or other non-deciduous) forests are being planted there. I think it's a similar story across Europe, but I'm most familiar with Ireland where modern forestry has used Sitka Spruce which is non-native and impacts biodiversity.


Sustainable logging isn't enough in itself to really maintain insect diversity because logging forests aren't very diverse forests so they only help a small number of insects thrive. But if done right (e.g. leaving some dead tree trunks behind when harvesting, as homes for insects) it is much better than nothing.


> before settlers arrived

I think you mean "before Native Americans arrived". One of the side effects of the European arrival to North America was reforestation due to a disease-driven decline in the population of Native Americans.


Seems appropriate to mention controlled burns preceding European settlers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_use_of_fire


Test


Even in the adgricultural midwest reforestation is notable. One factoid I recall is this: At the beginning of the 19th century, Indiana was about 85% forest and 15% barrens (prairies). By the 20th century it had become 20% forest and 80% open land and farmland. Now it is ore like 25% forest and 75% open land and farmland.

European deforestation was most extreme during the late middle ages and early modern period. When people were using wood for fuel in a growing economy, before switching to coal, major European nations were running out of trees. Coppicing was adopted out of a desperate need for basic resources.


Not everywhere. Much of the Midwest used to have a fire ecology, leading to prairie and Oak Savannah. Now forests of non-fire-resistant trees crop up on any bit of unused and unmaintained land.


My understanding is that there is a give and take between meadows and forests that occurs on multi-year cycle. Meadows grow when there is too much water, and trees grow when the water recedes. You can see this in the Yosemite Valley really clearly. Perhaps this is a sign that the freshwater in the ground is going away.


Large areas had been meliorated (in 70-ties in my country Poland) so the meadows are gone for good outside of some protected areas.

All these wild weeping willow which had been a signature of Masovian landscape and which I still remember from childhood visits to family farm died soon thereafter. So did the frogs. It is like coming to different country now.


Same in Lithuania. Although it's not as permanent as you might think. In 90s many state farms went under and huge portions of land was left to it's own devices. By 00s, many of them turned into grass with wild flowers, tiny trees, and everything Wherever melioration failed, it was slowly nearing meadow-like conditions. Now big portions of it are used again either for agriculture or housing...


> Perhaps this is a sign that the freshwater in the ground is going away.

Now look what Nestle/other food giants, but also slaughterhouses and animal farms, do: they use groundwater with private wells, and they extract more water than can be replenished... boom.


I wonder if sabotaging such private wells, by conrecte blocking parts of the aquifying layer would constitute as self-defense.


Most likely not, and you risk disruption of underground water flows by injecting huge amounts of concrete into the ground...


Yeah, lots of wet land have been drained for farming.


The massive use of neonicotinoides would not surprise me given the research of its impact on bee colony collapse.


Maybe a side effect of less bees pollination?


I was listening to an entomologist podcast on colony collapse and they were suggesting that as members of the colony became more and more impaired the interdependency of the various bee groups (workers, foragers, queen) was compromised and then "all of a sudden" the hive was unable to reliably function. And large social group (ants, termites, bees, etc) might be similarly affected.


Not unlike if one drives up the cost of rent in a city so high that the people who make it function, can't afford to live there and leave. Dogs don't get walked, burritos unmade and drinks unstiffened. Jane Jacobs outlined all of this decades ago.


And criminals don't get caught and fires don't get put out. SF is not quite there yet, but already most emergency responders live outside the city. (Article is from 2011. I'm sure the situation is worse today.) http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Most-S-F-firefighters-...


You reap what you sow.

If you DGAF about planning and resource management and just do the same thing year after year your fields will soon be useless for growing that one thing you've specialized in and it will suck to be you but none of your neighbors will feel sorry for you because they all saw it coming from years off.


What city has this problem? I haven't heard of a burrito extinction event, maybe I missed the news though.


If the burritos are extinct, you are definitely out of foie gras. First they came for PB&J, but I didn't complain, I ate lobster bisque.


All of which is only exacerbated by the über-rich buying property as investments, leading to almost completely empty neighborhoods, which obviously can't support convenience stores, laundromats, bars, cafes, bookstores and all of the other local business that support and are supported by locals.


Could you please share the link to the podcast?


I think it was on 99pi


Like breaking a food chain, thanks!


That unsuredness may be true about the collective data here but we definitely know that one particular species is in precipitous decline - the Monarch butterfly with it's 3400 mile annual journey to go north/south with the seasons. Since they only eat one plant, we could eliminate some causes directly (although they could be secondary causes - like making other plants/insects thrive).

https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0301/Mexico-s-monarch...


Don't forget glyphosate. Have you watched "mosanto in trial" ? The facts are frightening.


This year, I left a portion of my lawn unmowed. I seeded it with a $10 bag of wildflower seeds. It's given me 4 months of beautiful flowers, loads of polinators, many butterflies, and it's given me less yard to mow. I now think that lawns of neatly trimmed grass are about as dumb as it gets.


Yes, a big problem for insects in suburban areas is humans tendency to want "manicured" nature. Just walk around anywhere in e.g. silicon valley, where lawns are kept short and there are less than a dozen types of trees and bushes (also often trimmed) and you'll note there are very few insects, which has resulted in even fewer types of birds and practically no small animals. Insects need old, decomposing tree trunks and branches on the ground, and humans tend to remove those because it isn't tidy enough for them. I share a vacation house on a small (maybe 5 square km) island in the archipelago of Stockholm and despite there being houses on almost all of that island, we have 120 different species of birds on it. This is likely a result of a longtime policy that says house owners should strive to keep old, fallen trees when possible and avoid tidying up their land too much, and the parts that are public land are not interfered with much at all.


Yeah. I have a stack of fallen tree limbs / logs in one relatively hidden corner of my lawn. It turns into super good soil. It's got a bunch of insect life there, as well as good fungal life. And my neighbor's chickens love it.


A lot of people don't like having insects in their homes, so it would make sense that they manicure their lawns to reduce the number of insects around their homes.


It might, but how far do insects actually travel? If it was really restricted like that then it would surely be better to concrete over the yard and park their cars there.

I've seen various flying insects more than a hundred miles out to sea but I accept that not all insects fly.


now think that lawns of neatly trimmed grass are about as dumb as it gets.

Not just dumb: as far as biological life goes those trimmed lawns are pretty close to dead useless land.

Now, you don't even need the bags of flower seeds though it helps. Just mow your lawn + remove biomass only twice a year. At max 3, if you've been using fertilizer in the past, or down to 1 if the soil has gotten rid of most nutritients: by cutting grass and removing it you remove nutritients so the fast-growing plants (grasses, nettles, ...) get less of a chance while the slower growing ones (amongst which a lot of wild flowers are, as wel as plants which used to be common before mass-scale agricultuter but are now rare because they don't get a chance mostly due to the abdundance of nitrogen deposition) will florish. For maximum ecological results you'll also leave certain pieces untouched for a year (some butterflies/files/spiders need long grass to survive winter). Do this for a couple of years and your once neatly trimmed green piece of land will turn into an actually valuable piece of colourful nature. I realize this is not for everyone, e.g. it's not an ideal place to play football or teach your kids how to ride their bike, but if you have the chance it's worth giving it a shot.

An ideal tool for applying the above principle is the scythe. It has several advantages over machines like mowers and weedwackers: you learn how to use a nice tool which does not burn fossil fuel, makes no noise except from a satisfying 'swoosh', is relatively cheap yet will likely outlive you. Depending on how you use it it can be a tai-chi-like moment of peace to start the day, or you gan go full-on and treat it as your work-out instead of going to the gym. And in the end it is less work than keeping grass trimmed throughout the growing season (unless you have a robotic mower, or vast amounts of land): mowing/raking for a couple of hours twice a year doesn't even come close to the amount of time I see my neighbours running around with all their mowing devices bi-weekly even though I have more grass to cut than they have.


Given that I spent much of my childhood staring at and placing things on ant hills, I'm not so sure a meadow is a terrible thing for children.


We hardly watered our lawn during the three year California drought. Let it go dead and even had exposed soil in spots. When the rains came again we didn't mow for many months. It was fun to see all the different plants and wildflowers sprout and grow. Wish I could have given it a burn after it dried out in the summer instead of mowing, but in urban Oakland I don't think that would have gone over well.


Here's my kids doing their bit to protect the biomass in my back yard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukZA4Y7usQk

But in all seriousness, yes.. lawns are evil. Created in Victorian Britain to demonstrate wealth.. "look at me, I can afford to have un-productive land". I try to minimise them as much as possible on my 1.5 acre lot. Veggie gardens, mushroom logs, wetland and lots of dead wood as in the video

That all said, I keep a couple of hives, this might be the last year. For the last couple of year my otherwise very healthy hives have collapsed around this very time of year, I just noticed one wasn't doing well all of a sudden.

Roughly when everyone is putting stuff on their lawns for winter, especially the golf course a 1/4 mile away. I know correlation is not causation but it's an unusual time for hives to fail, they've been working all summer building up and it is this point that they are their strongest.

Frankly, my feeling has been for a while that we, as a species, are at the end of our golden age.


If you have sheep or cattle grazing, a short cropped "lawn" is just where you get your meat to eat.


Lawns and golf courses don't get rotated. They're permanent dead zones.


Ha, did exactly the same thing, since I noticed nearly no bees or other insects last year. I dedictated around 200 m² of my lawn to nature. I think it helped: This year, there where so much more of them to see.


Aren’t there local ordinances in some jurisdictions, requiring an orderly yard about the house? For sure, in many places there are laws regulating tree count and what you can and can’t chop down. I swear I’ve heard of fines for unmowed lawns too.


HOAs, township laws, etc — it is somewhat common in the US to be unable to do anything but grow grass in your front yard. We took advantage of the CA drought and tore out all our grass in front and replaced it with drought tolerant natives. It looks better and the kids didn’t play there anyway. And now we have monarchs.


Land of the free, indeed.

In all seriousness, if anyone tells you you can't have a thriving eco system in your yard, fight them on every level. Manicured lawns should be outlawed, not encouraged.


>somewhat common in the US in the parts of the US that are over-represented on HN

FTFY.


21% of all Americans live in common-interest housing. Half of that is condominiums, half is HOA-governed housing. It's a safe bet that large portions of that heavily restrict lawn conditions. Add in another ~10% of the country living in multi-family apartment buildings, which usually have no lawns or owner-controlled lawns.

And, of course, single-family home lawns in any densely populated area are likely to be regulated, many of which aren't high income. I can't get numbers on how many of those ~70% of Americans are under town restrictions, but it's not a trivial number.

So no, it's not just HN's demographics. This is genuinely widespread in the US; I'd estimate that at least 100,000,000 Americans live under some form of these restrictions.

https://www.caionline.org/AboutCommunityAssociations/Pages/S...

http://www.builderonline.com/money/economics/80-percent-of-a...


Homeowners on HN are wealthier and live in more densely populated areas than the average American homeowner. Wealth directly correlates with minimum standards of upkeep. Population density correlates with volume of rules and regulation. A suburb of Portland ME and Portland OR both likely have a bylaw disallowing you to run a pig farm without some paperwork/approval.

A suburb of Portlad OR is far more likely to have a bylaw or HOA reg about grass height or some other nit picky thing than the suburb of Portland ME because the OR suburb is wealthier and wealthy people have the time to care about these things, care about what the standards should be and care about how to enforce them.

Yes, many Americans live somewhere one or more rules/laws that control what they do on/with their own residential property. The Americans who are most represented here likely have far many laws/HOA rules with which they much comply.


Sure, agreed, but that's not what you said before.

Someone said it's "somewhat common in the US" to be restricted from growing eco-friendly laws. You "fixed" that statement by adjusting it to "somewhat common in the US in the parts of the US that are over-represented on HN".

The initial statement was true, there was nothing to fix. It might be "very common" among HN readers (though I'll bet they skew more urban than you're suggesting), but it really is "somewhat common" nationwide.

And the distinction isn't irrelevant, because this isn't just a parochial HN-reader concern - turf covers roughly 2% of US land. Not all of that is lawns, and not all of those lawns are legally constrained, but as I tried to demonstrate, the total amount is significant. I'm not objecting to the point that this situation has heavy demographic skew, I'm objecting to the implication that it isn't widespread.


Keep in mind the "more free" places also tend to be much less dense in general (not just fewer HN readers, fewer people in general). So even if it's relatively geographically isolated where these rules exist, it still covers a substantial portion of Americans (including HN readers).


AFAIK, I can do with my garden whatever I want to do, as long as a I don't turn it into forrest. But that's here in Austria. What you describe sounds terrible. Fines for not mowing? In which country do you live?


In the United States most (all?) cities have local ordinances regulating lawn height. For example, in Portland, Oregon “lawn areas” can be no more than 10 inches high[1]. Mind you, this is just for the city and only applies to lawns, not gardens, or forested areas on large acreages. I imagine it stemmed from helping reduce fires near dwellings, but that is a total guess. Rural areas will have different regulations though.

[1] https://www.portlandoregon.gov/citycode/article/514518


>Rural areas will have different regulations though.

Sometimes those can be even worse. I lived in a town of 300 growing up, and we often had to deal with the mayor's wife and occasionally the mayor himself coming to our door to tell us we were in violation of some lawn ordinance or another. This is particularly obnoxious considering that the only way to even look up town ordinances is to go to the other side of the county to view the documents at the county office.


If you're in Austria, you should definitely check out Sepp Holzer's farm[0].

Edit: Context: He's a permaculture farmer (one of the first), and has a really compelling solution to modern agriculture, in my opinion.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepp_Holzer


The land of the 'free' I believe they call themselves....


People are free to not move into a HoA area or gated community though. I'm looking to buy a house soon, and any HoA with any real authority causes me to reject the house based just on that. There's nothing wrong with the idea of "lets all agree to these rules that define a neighborhood we all would like to live in" in theory, but in practice the HoA contract is often a cudgel used to bludgeon people who aren't well liked into submission.


Yes, but government doesn't go away. You get HoAs that spring up outside of Denver, Austin and all the other places people from SV go when they're sick of SV. They get there and realize that while they don't miss lawn height rules they don't like their neighbor's copious power tool usage well into the evening or loud parties they create a HoA thinking that they won't recreate the situation where they come from. After all, they only want the rules to reign in or drive off a few people who's behavior they don't like. Over time the list of rules and regulations grows and personal freedom to do what you want on your own property slides down the greased slope into the abyss. It starts at reasonable noise restrictions (nothing >85 db as measured on your property line after 10pm on weeknights) and grows to include disallowing motor homes and trailers to be visible from the street, acceptable mailboxes and so on. The influx of poeple who don't want to put up with community (local government or HoA) micromanagement of what they do on their own property tapers off and is redirected at some further out suburb of whatever unnamed "up and coming" city we're talking about or to the suburbs of some other city all together. The cycle repeats itself. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

This isn't SV specific DC, NYC or pretty much any other large city has a slow drip exodus of upper middle class people from it's suburbs to the less stifling suburbs of some other city with similar results.


This is not specific to HoAs. Most non-rural ordinances have some definition of what is legal to have for a lawn, and those generally forbid natural growth.


The issue is homes/lots in dry areas with 1-meter-high dead weeds. After the California fires, and how quickly they spread, I can understand the concern.

That said, since the drought, there are thousands of dead lawns, and I've never seen these laws enforced.


They are regularly enforced with notices to clear weeds by a date certain or they will be cleared with costs charged to the property owner, at least in some CA jurisdictions.


I'm doing this when I move to a house with a garden, in a couple of years (my girlfriend needs to finish her PhD first).

I'll still want some lawn to play ball and such, but I'm all for keeping some wilder areas in the corners, let whichever flowers want to grow, grow there.


I highly recommend planting some milkweed in that area. I've done just about the same as you, although the previous owner had planted the milkweed. The monarch butterflies rely on it, and they're currently in decline.


oh my goodness, a home on my parent's street did this with their entire front yard. We turned the corner and I think it made us both instantly smile. It was precisely the dose of beautiful color we needed that day.

Of course later we drove by as they were all dying, not quite as dazzling a display lol That noted, I am all for this!


I concur, dumb. In addition we also pave over more and more soil everywhere on this planet.


> On the other hand, some types of beetles, ants, flies, mosquitoes, even wasps - are just new.

Afaik most of these are usually invasives species, displacing local populations, which is happening in the weirdest ways and places.

In Germany, our local ladybug species are on the verge of going extinct because an imported Asian ladybug species emits some kind of spores killing them, and the Asian ones generally being sturdier.

Eastern grey squirrels, brought to the European mainland from the UK, are also increasingly replacing local red squirrels. Red squirrels get through winter by hiding food supplies and staying lean and mean, while grey squirrels build up fat reserves.

What ends up happening is that the grey squirrels sniff out the food supplies of the red ones and clear them out to fill up their own fat reserves, that leaves the red squirrels with no food supplies to get through the winter and so they starve.

But I agree with your general sentiment, I remember nature being quite a bit "buzzier" when I was a kid, I always thought I felt that way because I might have paid more attention to things like insects as a kid, but I guess my feeling wasn't all that off.


>that leaves the red squirrels with no food supplies to get through the winter and so they starve.

Things with squirrels are a bit more complex. While the two species do fight over the same resource, the main reason for the decline of red squirrels is disease.

The grey squirrels carry squirrel-pox, which can be fatal to the reds. That's always the explanation I've heard cited for the decline in red squirrels in the UK at least:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squirrel_parapoxvirus


I think it's a combination of a number of factors. It's still really fascinating to me how the grey squirrel's survival tactic pretty much seems like it's built on exploiting the survival tactic of the red squirrels.

I wonder if the grey squirrels adapted this behavior because of previous encounters with red squirrels, displacing them in the process, or if it's just "bad luck" for the red squirrels to run into grey squirrels who just happen to perfectly counter their survival tactics?


Yeah, the orange Chinese ladybugs are everywhere here in Ontario too. The darn things cluster up into large groups on windowsills so you're cleaning up corpses, and critters bite too, and stink when you slap them.


Same thing happened with the squirrels in the Pacific Northwest. Little red ones replaced by the big grey ones.

In more remote places and in the mountains where the winters are harsher you still see the small red native squirrels though.


According to my recollection of the words of a tour guide in Vancouver, Canada, those big, dark squirrels we see around here were brought to Stanley Park from New York. Then they multiplied and kind of outcompeted the small native squirrels.

Someone's related blog: https://www.miss604.com/2015/03/grey-squirrels-of-stanley-pa...

Quote: So how did this squirrel get here just over 100 years ago? Some reports say that the squirrels were a gift from the Mayor of New York City in 1909 but Jolene from Stanley Park History found that in 1909 Vancouver Park Boar Chair, Charles Tisdall, wrote to various American cities in search of purchasing “grey squirrels” for Stanley Park.


> In more remote places and in the mountains where the winters are harsher you still see the small red native squirrels though.

And here I was thinking milder winters would benefit the red squirrels because they would have a better chance getting through those without food supplies/fat reserves. Guess it's actually more of an even playground in terms of food supplies, where things like the grey's parapoxvirus tip the balance in favor of more greys surviving.

Are harsher winter conditions harder on the grey squirrels? Maybe their fat-reserves give them a mobility disadvantage that becomes crippling in harsher winter conditions? Or maybe those remote places are so remote that grey squirrels merely haven't made it there, yet.


Eastern grey squirrels, brought to the European mainland from the UK

Don't blame us, they are an invasive species here too. Proper British squirrels are red.


Monarchs used to be a "oh cool, look, it's the 50-100 monarchs in that field which we'll see a couple times a week for the whole season" thing here. Now it's "holy crap, it's our one single monarch butterfly of the year!" thing.


That has a simple explanation, though. Monarch caterpillars can only survive on milkweed, and we've decimated the amount of milkweed around because we see it as, well, a weed.


You can help out with this by harvesting seeds and planting them all over!


I've been growing milkweed at my parents house and we saw a around 20 caterpillars this year! Unfortunately, ~1/2 of them didn't make it but we at least start seeing Monarchs again. Everyone should be planting better garden plants that can compared to the bland green bushes and grass that never blooms.


So basically the planet is starting to treat us as a kind of a ... weed, in return.


The planet isn't conscious and can't "treat us" as anything.

We are doing this to us. We are changing the environment to support short-term wants/needs at the expense of its human habitability in the future.


Let’s say you were interviewing a butterfly — or a Mayfly. A Mayfly lives for four or five days. Say that Mayfly was standing on the branch of a giant Sequoia tree in California, which lives for thousands of years. If you were to ask that Mayfly, “Do you perceive this branch that you are standing on as being alive?” The Mayfly would say, “Of course not. I’ve been here my entire life, four days, and the branch hasn’t done a doggone thing.” Yet when you look at the tree in our context, it is very much alive. It started with a seed, and it grew. Well, the earth is very much like that tree, and mankind is very much like that Mayfly. If we are lucky, we will live a hundred years. We are standing on a planet that was born four and a half billion years ago. It looked very different when it was born; it evolved and has changed. Africa used to be just outside the window here. Morocco was connected to Cape Cod. Beneath this building are rocks from Africa. It’s hard to imagine that. But if you were to sit on the moon, and look at the earth and blink your eyes once every million years, it would come blossoming to life.


Still doesn't mean this clump of rock has any kind of intentionality.


ohhh you, and your 'free will'


Not a great analogy. And even good analogies don't make great arguments.


> The planet isn't conscious and can't "treat us" as anything.

Well, we don't really know what consciousness really is, so it's hard to say that the Earth isn't conscious. After all, who would have thought a complex network of simple neurons arranged in a particular way would be conscious?


Of course the planet is conscious. The entire consciousness of the human race combined is a lower bound on the consciousness of the planet.


I guess it depends on what your boundary for the 'earth' is (sure, we're all made up of atoms that existed on the earth before they were us) but if you transported all humans to a different planet they would all be identically conscious and the earth, by your definition, would not. I think if you draw a boundary between human and earth it's hard to make the claim that the earth is conscious


Humans would not be identically conscious on a different planet because our consciousness is dependent on the environment in which it exists.

Even a cursory definition of consciousness must include the sum total of all of our sensory perception, and without the biome to augment that perception, it is impossible that our consciousness would not shift to accommodate the inclusion and exclusion of whatever difference in our sensory input would give to our experience of being alive.

We would all _be_ conscious (presuming relative health), but if we were all on Pluto, for example, the lack of light would change our consciousness, and for each individual this change would happen at a rate determined by their experience.

Perhaps this change would happen gradually enough for some that it might be considered an artifact of evolving, but certainly the change would begin the instant we left Earth's influence, and what might be considered our 'normal' state.

I realize it's a little (though I detest this term) 'hand wavy' because it's a thought experiment based on zero examples, but we do know that our consciousness is dependent on what we perceive and don't perceive. Hence the question posed by Nagel [1] "what is it like to be a bat?", as bats are cognitively very close to humans (relative to the entire biome), but without eyesight, it is fairly clear that the consciousness of a bat would be different than that of a human.

I recognize that this point is not necessarily the one central to your comment, but I do think it's interesting to remember that if we were not here, we would not be as we are.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_it_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F


By that argument, my house is conscious whenever I'm at home.


Did your house spontaneously give rise to the lifeforms from which you evolved?


What would that have to do with consciousness?


The planet isn't conscious and can't "treat us" as anything.

You may want to revisit that assumption.

Being as the science on this subject is changing very rapidly, as we speak.


Time to face facts. Some of us are weeds.


George Carlin called it.


Indeed. Talk about a man ahead of his time.


Not getting my hopes up, but have seen more this year (Ohio) than I remember seeing in a long time. As in, like maybe 4-5 instead of 1-2, but I'll take it.


replying to your comment, I have seen hundreds of monarch butterflies this year. so many, my cat has given up and runs away. I have problems walking around. There are also dozens of other types of butterflies. Like I said you have to stop when you are walking and let them fly away 30-50 at a time. I actively look where I walk because I don't want to run into them, like in-my-face-there-are-so-many. So I don't know what everyone is talking about.


Where have you seen all these butterflies?


I am Vietnamese. There was a mythically rare oil called 'ca cuong' that not many have experienced in their life but was mentioned enough times in traditional folklore and old-timey food novels. The oil is from a little cockroach-like insect that has a liquid producing sac in their body. They live in rice fields that span across the north of Vietnam. It was believed you have to catch hundreds of them to harvest those little sacs just to have just a raw drop.

So ten years ago when I was 20, I had the chance to go with my rich old friend-boss to a relatively high-end restaurant. He called a noodle dish -- I have eaten the same dish -- that cold noodle with shrimp paste (which smells pungent but tastes good) -- for hundreds of times in my life and I didn't expect anything different. But before we started, the waitress brought up a bottle that has a small pipette and dropped a little drop to the paste. The aroma was warm and fuzzy like how you would think of the cinnamon apple juice for a cold day. When I tasted the same dish, it tasted so warm, so rich, and so aromatic. But that's about as good as words get because it was unlike anything I have had in my life. It transformed the dish and my experience to another level of existence. It was that little bug that made me appreciate the food, my life, and the little heritage in the little country, where, honestly, not a lot of things really made sense. But definitely, that little drop of oil does make a lot of sense.

Fast forward one year ago, life has been so much easier to me. Food is abundant, but I sometimes miss that little dish. I asked my parents if they could get some of the ca cuong oil to me, even if it's expensive (as it always has been believed). They tried then replied that they couldn't source the oil, no one sells it. Further researching revealed to me that the little insect has gone practically extinct and it is now illegal to catch them. I want to believe that it wasn't me that contributed to it, but maybe I did. It was more widely believed, however, that the widespread use of pesticide and insect-resistant rice has pushed the little insect to extinction in just a matter of 10-15 years.

The day I figured that out, I feel died a little bit inside. I feel something was lost when I, and many people around me, was busy pursuing. I am now doing work that has a lot to do with biology, and I go to talks of people having that little spiel with how our challenge for the 8-billion people world is food security. I heard PhD students and faculty talking about how great is insect-resistant plants. The scientists in large agree with the assertion that GMOs aren't harmful. My friends would go great lengths to defend GMOs on their blogs and facebook statuses. They are all hardcore, hardworking, real scientists with good intents. I tend to believe smart people meant goodwill.

Still, the world marches forward for whatever it marches forward for, little insects that eat human's food be damned.


Wow, amazing story. Unfortunately, scientists, for all their glorification of skepticism, are often not quite skeptical enough...


I was wondering about my experiences of not seeing bugs I'd see as a kid. Not sure if I just didn't go hunting like I used to or if there was an absolute decrease. I remember spotting these many times and catching a few http://www.mappingmegan.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/1-90-..., now I mainly see their hairier cousins http://www.suttonmass.org/animals/spiders/orbweavercrucifera...

Various little butterflies would be abundant seem much less now. I wish I knew their names.


I totally agree with the anecdotal perceptions around the decrease in insects since childhood. In my case, what I noticed recently was how few times my children have been stung by bees/wasps at their current ages, compared to how many times I was stung at those ages.

My seven-year-old daughter has never been stung. My ten-year-old son claims he was stung once, but I'm not sure I believe him. By the time I was ten years old, I had been stung at least a dozen times. (I can still remember some of the particular stings, just due to the severity of the swelling.)

This strikes me as odd, and in the context of this paper, frightening.


Did you spend more time outdoors, or in woodlands?


I’m seeing a ton of wasps this year too. Also seems like there’s way more spiders in recent years.


Tons of wasps. Wasps everywhere and carpenter bees. It's insane. I don't recall it being like this when I was a kid.


I could barely mow my lawn last weekend. They just kept attacking me. Didn't even get to trim the edges because I was tired of being stung.


Maybe they're trying to tell you to stop mowing the lawn and start enjoying the meadow?


This might not apply to GP if they're not in an incorporated area, but in cities, the wasps should tell that to city councils, which tend to have established rules regarding height of lawns and weeds and such.

Good luck talking to them about it; you'll be labelled a green wacko one step removed from eco-fanatics who firebomb SUV dealerships. If you don't want or like proper suburban manicured lawns, maybe you shouldn't live around everyone else who does want them, would be their attitude.

Even if you dodge that hurdle by finding stuff that doesn't need mowing or edging, your neighbors are going to think you're crazy if your yard is all monkey grass or vines or cacti.


> Good luck talking to them about it; you'll be labelled a green wacko one step removed from eco-fanatics who firebomb SUV dealerships.

Yes, and? That's them projecting the weakness they actually do have inside them on you. To the degree you are free from weakness, their weakness will destroy them, so be the wall they splatter themselves against, be the water they drown in.

> your neighbors are going to think you're crazy if your yard is all monkey grass or vines or cacti.

If someone genuinely thinks a person who is otherwise acting perfectly normal is genuinely, clinically crazy because of some vines or weeds... there's a reason for that, too. If you end up with such neighbors, laugh your ass off and go about your day. Walk softly, carry a big stick, and let honesty be your biggest ruse. If you want to please everybody, you're going to be a hostage of the worst and then still die like all of us. So "cut the crap, fuck the rest."


“Enjoy” a meadow full of stinging insects?


First off, stinging insects hardly make up 100% of the biomass of a meadow, so if it's full of stinging insects, it's a bowl filled with stinging insects, not a meadow.

Secondly, http://www.countrylovers.co.uk/hort/wildgrdn.htm

> Where 'attracts insects' is mentioned you can assume that birds will also be consequently be attracted

https://www.kingsseeds.co.nz/Kings+Seeds+Blog/x_post/Plants-...

> But what if we are trying to DISCOURAGE insects from coming into our garden. After all, there are some we just get completely sick of. What can we sow to help us to repel the insects we don’t like? Here are some ideas for that:

Thirdly, if all fails, enjoy it with binoculars. You'll live. Heck, most people will even survive insect stings.


Just so we're clear here, you're whole argument here is that people shouldn't mow the lawn b/c it causes stinging insects, but at the same time doesn't cause stinging insects? What is your point exactly?


> Just so we're clear here, you're whole argument here is that people shouldn't mow the lawn b/c it causes stinging insects, but at the same time doesn't cause stinging insects? What is your point exactly?

Well if you read the link, I believe the point was that some plants attract stinging insects and others repel them. Also, stings. You'll live.


> Also, stings. You'll live.

As long as you're not allergic like I am. Sometimes nothing, other times... it no good.


And ticks.


Put a small amount of tick repellant _on yourself_ and check yourself for ticks after being out. Contrast that defensive strategy with an offensive strategy, which seems to be a tick apocalypse.


What do we need ticks for?


In my area, this is attributed to the mild winter last year.


Less butterflies and fish, more wasps and squids.

Thanks climate change!


thanks overfishing...


Same in rural Ohio, tons of both this year


Isn't it well understood that Monsanto with its gen manipulated crap is very bad for humans and animals (like bees).

"EU report on weedkiller safety copied text from Monsanto study"

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/15/eu-repor...


Once we are gone, they’ll all come back: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/23/wildlife-returns-...


Butterflies - exactly the example I wanted to mention too. In childhood I saw them often, now - very rarely.


A field of butterflies in the cow pasture feeding on manure. Pure joy. Rarely seen now, more the lone floater on the wind.


Invertebrates often get overlooked for conservation efforts and money spent, in favor of larger animals. Pollinators are critically important for their direct food supply services, but we really just don't know the full ecological impact down the road of mass species loss on a scale we could be heading towards with many other species of insects, other arthropods, molluscs, coral, etc.

If you're in the US, we have a great conservation organization for invertebrates that is doing great work on both habitat revival and pesticide reduction, and receives not nearly enough donations: https://xerces.org/


Don't different species normally wax and wane in prevalence? And enter/leave areas? A particularly cold winter can kill off a certain type of insect and the loss lasts for year.

How can we determine how much of the change we even have control over?


When 75% of _all_ flying insect biomass is lost, that's not just wax / wane. Considering the only difference in the past 2 years vs. the other thousands of years that insects have survived is human intereference, doesn't this suggest that we have complete control over this change?


I'll respond with my ancedotal experience as well. I live on a farm and the bugs are irritating as ever. There is a lot of pesticide used around here and I have used pesticide as well on the lawn. It hasn't decreased the number of bugs.


well for few years we had a severe reduction of monarchs and (blue/black variety whose name escapes me) in NW metro Atlanta but they returned this year in large numbers. Also returning, not sure of exact connection, but the tent caterpillars were abundant after seemingly being gone.


I never read "silent spring", but the title has stuck with me since childhood. Perhaps I'll read it now.


[flagged]


I wouldn't jump into blaming the climate. We've shifted many parts of a very complex system in the last 50+ years.

I'd put monoculture and pesticides higher on my list of suspects.


As an anecdotal data point, I'm trying to establish a robust, poly-culture, mostly chemical-free agricultural system on my hobby farm. We do seem to get more flying insects on my place than our neighbors, all of whom have grass lawns. Critters of all kinds, in fact - lots of frogs and toads as well, and box turtles. Obviously I haven't done a scientific study, but we see butterflies, lighting bugs, and so on; not as many as I saw growing up but they are there in some numbers.

If you look around suburbia, there really isn't much ecological space for anything to grow unless it can survive on grass. Even in a lot of rural areas, with the advent of heavy-chemical farming and bigger and bigger monocultures, we're taking a lot of living space away from mother nature.


I think it's up to city planners to include more green belts. Better for the environment, better for water drainage, better for humans, it's really win win win.


City planners would if they could, but they're not autocrats. They know that green space (and mixed zoning and high density and...) is a good thing, but they are captive to the whims of politicians and poorly-informed citizens. And property developers have more than enough money to buy policy and sway public opinion.

A close relative is a city planner, a job he went into as an idealist. He saw the economic, social, and ecological suffering created by terrible urban design, and he wanted to make a better world. After 30+ years, though, he's jaded and cynical.

He's seen historically active flood and landslide and earthquake areas quietly and repeatedly re-zoned for residential development. He's seethed at 40 years of opposition to even modest expansions of mass transit. Suburban sprawl, ghettoization of the poor, retail-only developments... At this point, although he still does his best to advance healthy policy, he's resigned to the fact that the developers always win in the end.

So please don't direct your ire at city planners. In many places, they're the only resistance to the boundless greed of property developers. As in all things, it's important to follow the money. The only people getting rich off the status quo are banks and developers.


I'm honestly sorry about the situation you talk about.

It must be frustrating..

People work hard but it's difficult to make things genuinely better.

Thanks for enlightening me.


One of our problems is the idea that a single cause is responsible for these things. It is not just pesticides or CO2 or some other single change. It is the combination of those changes (even the small ones) that is driving this huge environmental problem. The only way to get out of this is starting to think of the environment is a complex system that needs to be preserved, not trying to find a single culprit that we can manipulate.


Less finger-pointing, more parameter-tweaking!


Fireflies are interesting - as a New England kid in the 80s, I used to read about them in all sorts of childrens' books, but I was really bummed because I never saw one. I think I saw one firefly in my whole childhood. I just went back to Long Island this summer, and they were all over. It'd get to be twilight and hundreds of them would just be dancing through the air. I got to show my wife the childhood scene that I'd only imagined.

Maybe all the fireflies moved from Michigan to New York. I think I'd read somewhere that firefly populations tend to be very cyclical anyway though.


Attributing this to climate change in it's political context is as ignorant of actual science as what you claim to be detesting.


Some of the people you go out of your way to slander as both trump supporters and climate change deniers exist as they do because of people like you, who immediately take any adverse global trend, blame it on climate change with what amounts to shakey, correlative evidence, and then shame anyone who dares glance over with a skeptical eye.

We are dumping all kinds of chemicals into the environment - pesticides, plasticizers, and a host of bio-active compounds which we already know may be directly responsible for the decline of certain individual species[1].

Climate change is a serious threat. But your post is an example of how climate change has become a highly politicized meme.

Next thing you know, it becomes a cultural taboo to be skeptical about climate change, and suddenly we're only asking the questions we are allowed to ask, looking for the data we are allowed to look for, sweeping inconsistencies under the rug, and just generally practicing sloppy science.

The scientific method necessitates skepticism. I welcome sources to the contrary, but modern western climate science is void of any published criticism, or at least it was when I had access to journals some 5 years ago. Hell, I couldnt find ONE paper discussing ANY benefit on any place on earth from a warmer climate-which is absurd, because northern permafrost could thaw and create arable land, for example.

Climate science has been sickened by politics and political correctness. You should be very wary.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder


> I couldnt find ONE paper discussing ANY benefit on any place on earth from a warmer climate-which is absurd, because northern permafrost could thaw and create arable land, for example.

Bullshit.

Here's what I found within two minutes, from the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report, i. e. the currently valid "bible" of climate change:

Studies since the AR4 have confirmed that high-latitude locations will, in general, become more suitable for crops (Iqbal et al., 2009). Trnka et al. (2011), for example, examined projections of eleven agro-climatic indices across Europe, and found that declines in frost occurrence will lead to longer growing seasons[..]

https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg2/WGIIAR5-Ch...

Start of Section 7.3.4. on page 504.


Saying that science is biased because it fails to see the benefit of global warming is like saying it's biased because it doesn't discuss the benefit of a worldwide plague.

Sure, there'd be benefits: fewer lines at amusement parks, all the food you can eat, etc. But that's so far from a net "good" that only a psychopath or moron would publish a paper with that argument.


How would you even know of there has been so little research on the subject? How can you claim to have an unbiased answer when you only research one side of a topic?

I legitimately want to ask you how you can be so sure that our doomsday scenarios are accurate, when we still have a fledgling understanding of a massive chaotic system like climate, and when almost all research has been purposefully negative?

If you look hard enough, you'll find anything. That's why skepticism is necessary. You'll at least agree that anything remotely pro climate change is taboo, I hope, and there is no room for taboo in science, in my opinion.

Edit: hell, how long have we known about deep ocean currents? Stratification of the subsea into various isoclines and thermoclines? Calthrates? People seem to underestimate how complex climate is, and how much we've yet to discover.


> How would you even know of there has been so little research on the subject? How can you claim to have an unbiased answer when you only research one side of a topic?

Like a plague, the millions or billions of human deaths is all the research we need. No benefit is going to counterbalance that.

Just to take one example (of many) of deadly things that are already happening that you yourself mentioned: permafrost melting.

"More arable land" also means "the release of incredibly dangerous, dormant pathogens like anthrax". Kinda makes the "arable land" moot.

https://www.vox.com/2017/9/6/16062174/permafrost-melting


So you would say we are at perfect temperature now, or should we pursue strategies to cool the globe toward a cooler temperature?


You seem to be under the misapprehension that climate change is simply fiddling with the thermostat. The decidedly ill-chosen name of "Global Warming" might certainly lead in that direction.

But here's the thing - the weather systems on the planet are rather complex systems that are in a somewhat stable equilibrium. Changing temperature will affect that equilibrium, which will mean rather impressive upheaval. Both a warming and a cooling will have catastrophic effects for humanity. What we should pursue are strategies that prevent shifting too far from that fragile balance. No matter which direction.


You seem to be under the misapprehension that we are at a stable equilibrium. The temperature and weather systems of the planet have continually been changing since forever. Do you consider the last ice age part of the somewhat stable equilibrium you refer to? It is impossible to hold the current state, it will inevitably change, it is just a matter of how fast, how well we can deal with it.


Nice attempt to move the goal posts.

Read the text. Somewhat stable. I'm well aware it moves, but it's moving much more rapidly than anything we've experienced, and at least a large part of that is without any doubt anthropogenic.

So how about you stop trying to parse words, and engage with the issue?


It'd be good for other species, however ;) Except for those that we farm, anyway.


So you're angry that perhaps some of the people that are trying to affect change for a cleaner planet are doing so under misinformation? You seem to be the one politicizing things. I think most of us just want to support ideas, technology, and people that make sense. Cleaner more sustainable energy just makes sense regardless of what you think about bugs and weather.


I hate to admit it but whatever the solution to this problem will be, Trump supporters will almost certainly fight against it.


Yes, it has nothing to do with anything based in reason or fact it's just heaps and heaps of angry stupid spewed in an attempt to defend their holy tangerine.

edit: words.


Results like this are some confirmation of what everyone not entirely swaddled in the virtual worlds of city and business is already entirely aware of: that our living planet is dying. All the people I know who have lived in rural areas for decades (in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia and SE. Asia) are in no doubt that their local ecologies are collapsing, and that the collapse is accelerating.

I'm not sure how useful the knowledge is at this late stage. Turning things around would require changes of a pace and scale that we have no idea how to motivate and coordinate. Fork and done, I reckon.


I'm starting to think that as well. As a father it hits me much harder, and I think I'm at stage four of the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. The human race may just not be special and will be erased, sooner rather than later.


I think when it comes to climate change, you can end up in one of three buckets:

- denier (perhaps the happiest group)

- defeatist (I recycle and cycle to work, but what can I do? I'm just one person, its all so bad, I'm depressed)

- activist (I'm going to do something about this now, they can't do this to my children)

I think one of the biggest problems facing us on climate change is somehow making better use of people who care than letting them fall into defeatist mode.


Well, don't let my depression lead you to the wrong conclusion. I'm am (somewhat) active - I donate to climate causes, it's my number one issue when voting, I drive a hybrid, only buy organic food, minimize eating meat, minimize consumption, grow some of my own food, bike when I can, minimize electricity use, etc. I do recognize that it's not enough and we all need to basically go back pre-industrial lifestyles to really make enough of a change to matter.


No, you're not active. You're still a consumer, you've just changed your consumption choices to feel less bad. Join an activist group and start protesting, picketing, learn about direct action tactics, and interrupt the smooth running of the machine that is killing you and destroying your future.

Trust me, even taking small actions against an impossibly large problem feels about 1000 times better than sitting there wringing your hands over it.


Hence why I said somewhat active, and ended my post with "I do recognize that it's not enough and we all need to basically go back pre-industrial lifestyles to really make enough of a change to matter."

What are some things that you are doing?


I'm a political activist. I'd prefer not to go into specifics while I have [ending charges :)

I don't mean to suggest that I have The Best strategy or tactic that you should deploy right now. These are hard problems we're talking about, and my long-term aims are plotted over 10-30 year timescales, and realistically the chances of achieving those are very tiny. I pursue a political approach because that's where my knowledge and skills seem likely to have the most effect.

I'm not sure that we need to necessarily go back to pre-industrial lifestyles in some sort of neo-primitivism movement. Perhaps I'm wrong and this will be forced upon us, but I believe that our capacities for invention and redeployment of our resources make it possible to change direction as a species. That has never been done before, and it will be fearfully difficult, even dangerous. But I prefer failure to passivity.

I've mentioned the 'deep green resistance' group partly because this thread is focused on ecology and partly because it's a good overview of the different theories and techniques of activism. Maybe if I were talking to one of the authors I'd get castigated for being too focused on political considerations and not putting the environmental issue at front and center of my efforts. But that's where my bets are placed for the time being.


I believe the only practical approach is a positive one.

Lets assume we're going to survive climate change. After all, we have to.

And lets assume we're going to survive it without needing to go back to our pre-industrial lifestyles:

- we're going to drive around in our EVs, charged from renewable sources

- we're going to sit at home playing video games and living in VR (because that's a nice energy efficient way to spend our days)

- we'll hopefully have access to modern medicine and the other benefits of our existing economy

I think once we start viewing survival from climate change more positively, we can start making better decisions.

For example, if we're going to survive, do we want to do so inside some sealed dome, hooked up to a desalination plant, where our day jobs are manually pollinating the few species of plant that have survived?

Or do we aspire for nature to remain at least somewhat intact, and for our plants to be pollinated in the current way - magically, by insects?


How do you 'survive' climate change when it results in over 2 billion refugees, resulting ineluctably in wars? How do you survive topsoil and fresh water disappearance? How do you survive the death of the oceans? How well do you think we will manage as nearly every ecosystem around us collapses due to the multiplicity of stressors that fake 'economic growth' imposes (very well-attested worldwide).

They're rhetorical questions of course. I hardly expect you to come up with a solution for the globe's ills (hats off to you if you can; I certainly don't have a clue). But the exclusive focus on climate change is itself one of the biggest dangers we face. It tempts with the prospect of a narrow technical fix while leaving current ideologies and institutions intact. We know where that road leads, with or without further climate change (in addition to that already locked in).


All fair points, and "how well do you survive" - for me, if nature as we know it has gone, it would be a pretty shit survival.

But I feel we might make more progress if we can tell people that they will be able to keep playing their video games, rather than have to fall back to some peasant existence where they till fields from dawn to dusk.

Because we do have technology on our side, we will need to travel, and its impossible to imagine us living in anything other than a capitalist structure where people are still working, enjoying themselves, competing with others. Even if its competing for the best quarters within the biodome rather than the biggest beachfront house.

I feel that talk of the death of "current ideologies and institutions" is probably scary to many, and (I don't know if you're suggesting this) starting from the point of having to stop all economic growth will alienate many.


I guess I'm just stating hard truths here, rather than trying to pitch to anyone. I don't know how I'd win anyone over. And in any case for other reasons, I suspect H.Sapiens overrunning the Earth's carrying capacity is probably a biological fait accompli.

> (I don't know if you're suggesting this) starting from the point of having to stop all economic growth

I sort of am, except that I put "economic growth" in scare quotes not as a childish jibe, but because I believe it is a fiction. The 'growth' is just a transfer of matter from living ecologies to dead technologies. A certain amount of that could clearly have been managed, but as (from most accounts) we're already roughly at 200-300% of the earth's carrying capacity, degrowth (ie. reducing matter transfer out of real complex ecologies so they can re-establish themselves) is now the only thing that could save us. And it won't happen, presumably.


That's a fascinating concept, but I don't think all growth is of that sort (even if much of it is).

Facebook as one example has seen enormous growth. Was it bad for the planet? (apart from the incalculable cost of being an attack vector against the more easily manipulated members of society, leading to an anti-environmental administration).

Maybe not. Facebook users sit quietly, hunched over their phones, sipping small amounts of energy. Comparing them to someone who drives their 4WD for a hobby, they look good.


You're right of course, and I would hardly claim to have a fully articulated theory. I'm fairly confident though of the minimal notion that aggregate "economic growth" (sorry, I need the scare quotes) is at the cost of entropy increase in evolved ecologies (another way of putting 'matter transfer from living to dead').

There was much talk in the 90s of decoupling economic growth from 'resource use' (sorry about the scare quotes again: I also think the term 'resource' masks a related myth). There were even individual companies that claimed to be getting there (eg. IIRC a carpet company that leased carpets to offices so they could control the whole lifespan?).

But evolution has had millions of years to explore state spaces using recycling. Carpet companies notwithstanding, on a planetary scale I doubt we can do it any more efficiently than evolved systems do, without developing systems of comparable complexity. And we're clearly centuries (at least) away from being up to that, and we don't have centuries to play with.


Good on you. If it's worth doing anything at all, that 'anything' has to be on a political level. Consumer action is a dead duck, albeit a convenient one for the green-hued sector of corporatocracy. Green parties have wasted enough of our time with it.

It's a shame so much political activism is protest rather than construction. That's probably inevitable given the configuration of political power and the sheer speed of the destruction (locally for example I certainly don't want the Adani lunacy to go ahead). And protest can develop community which can be a usefully subversive form of construction. But there's something slightly unsatisfying there, and it doesn't suit everyone's predispositions.


I had to google Adani. That is some farking madness.


You're not kidding. The silver lining is that if it goes ahead (there's much doubt over the project being funded), it is quite likely to prompt a surge in activism greater than anything Australia has seen in decades. It is not a popular project.


Yeah, that wasn't aimed at you. More a general observation that one of the biggest problems with climate change is how we think about it. I'll bet there are a lot of people who have more or less given up. I've talked to some people who are not really deniers but rather people who don't want to know, and find it easiest to not think about it at all.


I think part of that "giving up" comes from there not being a plausible vision to a sustainable future. If all it took was cutting down, even significantly, on daily indulgences, and a clear set of numbers showed that, then I believe we could get people on board. But the main issue is that power brokers, both in policy and in media, refuse to make those sacrifices, and their decisions have several of orders of magnitude more effect than individual actions. And the individuals know it.


Isn't organic food more costly to make?

> I do recognize that it's not enough and we all need to basically go back pre-industrial lifestyles to really make enough of a change to matter.

Bah. Charge a dollar per kg of carbon released and the problem will almost solve itself. It's much more a problem of political will than it is a problem of technical capability.


Human race will survive. When extinction level event will be certain then 20-30 underground mini cities will be created and biggest minds will create solution for humans to survive there for 100+ years. Of course only privileged will be chosen to live there. 7 billions of people will die but human race will survive.


"We must not allow a mineshaft gap!" A more poetic cinematic exploration of that topic if Verdens Undergang, best watched accompanied by a good orchestra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_the_World_%281916_f...

Sorry, if humanity allows it to come as far as requiring mineshafting for pure self-inflicted ecological overexploitation, it does not deserve survival.


Only "a boot stamping on a human face, forever", will survive that. Not a human foot, not a human wearing a boot, just a boot -- I think these words were chosen carefully.


" Turning things around would require changes of a pace and scale that we have no idea how to motivate and coordinate."

Things like electricity, the automobile, air travel and the internet went from nonexistent to universal in developed countries in phenomenally short time spans. Renewable energy appears to be following a similar trajectory, leaving all the estimates in the dust and emerging faster than most people realize or can keep track of. Fast enough? Well, we'll find out. But at this point you can't say it's slow.


Two problems with that.

Firstly: climate change is only one of the problems caused by a culture based almost entirely on the ecocidal fantasy of stolen-from-the-future 'economic growth'. We are losing topsoil at a dizzying pace. Fresh water is disappearing. The habitats on which natural systems depend are being ripped apart. Novel substances are being created and released into our air, water and land with unknown consequences. Climate change is a single crisis piled upon multiple others. Case in point: Australia's Queensland inner reefs are almost completely gone, and the outer reefs have only a few decades left. Causes: multiple, from nutrient-rich agricultural runoff (largely from pointless vanity sugar cane production), to wholesale destruction of coastal ecosystems including mangroves, which are crucial nurseries for many reef fish. Increasing ocean temperatures deal the final blow to already critically weakened ecosystems. This is our planet in miniature. Climate change isn't the problem. It's yet another symptom of the same fundamental dynamic, delivered as just the latest and largest of a series of blows many ecosystems will not survive.

Secondly: the changes needed are not only (and perhaps not primarily) technological. They require planetary coordination and cooperation to handle on political and social levels, and the defeat of a crazed unthinking ideology of unhindered 'economic growth'. Fundamental changes of attitude and societal organisation need to be agreed upon in the next few decades, and implemented without delay. Yet we can't even agree on obvious tiny measures like removing nuclear weapons, and rogue wealthy nations resist nearly every attempt to do anything meaningful about any of the critical issues. We just don't know how to do what's needed, and there are no solutions on the horizon. And we are still locked into fantasies of national government and sovereignty, despite being (factually & physically) a global civilisation.

Look at the political convulsions happening now as a consequence of current worldwide refugee crises. But that's minuscule compared to what's coming. Imagine what happens when ocean level rises cause two billion refugees to seek somewhere to live. Given our level of global immaturity, what do you think will happen? It will be all wars and walls. And our capability, in the midst of such convulsions, to make (and keep) difficult international agreements? Nil.

I'd absolutely love to be wrong. But all physical and social indicators are pointing in the same direction.


So start doing something. What have you got to lose if you're already doomed? Get yourself a copy of Deep Green resistance and join an aboveground affiliate group. It's easy to manufacture excuses not to do something because it looks impossible. So what? Better than saying you sat there and did nothing and watched it all disintegrate.


Cutting down our per head footprint is nice and laudable, but it's really just a minor tweak to the "O" in an exponential "Big Oh".

I suspect that crispinb deems something much more paradigmatic necessary than just a bit of reprorization in economic policies and everybody using less plastic bags. Some paradigm shifts are so big that it is very difficult to even think about them loudly without getting universally shunned.

What if, for example, you are convinced that for long term planetary survival (on a level that can support the human species), individualistic basic human rights will have to occasionally take a second place? That's what tyranny is made of, but that's also what desperate measures are made of. You won't win any popularity contests with that...


No disagreement on any of that. I don't want to scare people off with inflammatory suggestions (which is why I suggest aboveground activism rather than taking up pipeline sabotage, but I am absolutely for paradigmatic change despite the inevitability of violent opposition.


Deep green resistance advocate for blowing up power plants and other kinds of monkey wrenching. I don't think they're just trying to "cut down the per head footprint"...

> individualistic basic human rights will have to occasionally take a second place?

One could argue that this is the case right now. That the lack of protection of individual human rights is what got us into this mess. It wasn't individuals in communities that asked for their lands to be taken by a wealthy few or by corporations, to be used for generating profit through environmental destruction. Many people actively struggled against the acquisition and destruction of local ecological habitats. They were a majority opposing a small few powerful people or businesses. But the "individual rights" of those few were valued more and now the many must suffer the consequences...


It's not about me. [edit: by which I mean we were talking about the phenomenon of ecological collapse here. I said nothing about my personal response, and don't intend to]


> Things like electricity, the automobile, air travel and the internet went from nonexistent to universal in developed countries in phenomenally short time spans

Oh, hey, thats about the same "phenomenally short time span" that everything started going to shit.


K. Let's get rid of electricity and go back to horses and sail boats as our prime travel options, then.


> Let's get rid of electricity and go back to horses and sail boats as our prime travel options, then.

Too late for that. And I don't see anyone offering easy answers.

But pretending that what's happening in the real world isn't happening, or frantically waving totems of electronic consumer satisfaction about, won't make those physical realities go away.


Solar panels, electric bicycles, and not completely-effing-crazy urban design is actually a pretty easy answer.

But everyone wants to live on an island of asphalt with a sterile, depression patch of grass in front, at least three miles away from the nearest place to buy a cup of coffee (a disposable cup, natch).

Actually, not everyone does, but those who do, made it illegal to build anything else. At least in the US.


> But everyone wants to live on an island of asphalt with a sterile, depression patch of grass in front, at least three miles away from the nearest place to buy a cup of coffee (a disposable cup, natch).

... I love how the cliche environmentalists worldview is to reduce these problems to entirely the result personal choice. As if consumers chose petroleum as the most efficient and widespread fuel in the earth's crust, and the combustion engine, then decided they wanted highways and suburbs, etc. Instead of thousands of small choices over a century (or more) based on circumstance, central planning, present needs, etc - things largely out of their control. Combined with other biological human flaws like short term thinking and favouring political populism and emotion when voting/buying.

Not to mention, the widespread adoption of suburbs was not a product of market capitalism or consumerism... it was the result of government zoning and regulatory policy:

https://www.amazon.com/Zoned-Out-Regulation-Transportation-M...

You may be convinced and have deep knowledge of the subject but it's far from common knowledge. Understanding of climate issues is very low and it's not entirely the result of ignorance or malice or compromise because someone loves having a big lawn.

I tried to educate myself on the subject, I love to read, but even I found it difficult to find good books on the subject, specifically books that were balanced and scientific instead of sounding like the ravings of an ideologue.

I've asked on HN for book recommendations on climate change multiple times and each time I've been pointed to websites with dry 150 page reports by non-profit organizations. It's far from easy to know better.


I was just stating that its the same timing. i think those things enabled globalization and too many hyper efficiencies but they themselves aren't the cause.


How does renewable energy prevent the mass extinction of insects?


> Turning things around would require changes of a pace and scale that we have no idea how to motivate and coordinate

Yes everything leads to that question: How can a problem of global scaled be solved, if it seems to be almost impossible to make some progress domestically?

I think I begin to see what the "solution" is going to be like.

The good news is: The planet is not going to die. The bad news: I guess you not gonna like the solution.

I'm convinced that in 10-20 we are going to live much more eco friendly. It will become much more expensive to waste natural resources. But as a downside of this we will loose a lot of personal freedom. Our highly individualized society will come to an end and we will live in a much more controlled environment.

Harmfull behaviour will either be punished with legal sanctions (like corruption) or in some form of social disaproval.

TLDR: In the next 20 we will see a greener but also more unfree world.


In other parts of the world like Canada things are becoming alive with the changes. The earth is a living ecosystem.


It's warming up, isn't it? I'm hearing about a loss of permafrost. Sounds like it's becoming more habitable up north.


buy lots of land up there while its cheap. thats gonna be the only prime land in a few years.


A good chunk of it will be underwater. Make sure to buy something that is higher than 100m above sea level.


You might be on to something. Long-term thinking is the single greatest predictor of long-term success!


You can see the changes just fine in the city. New weather, different bugs, local forests ravaged by invasive pests, all that stuff is plainly visible to me.


Yes of course you can if you're sensitive and observant. That's why I limited my observation to those 'entirely swaddled' within the built & busy human world. I don't know what it's like where you live, but here in Australia, there are millions who never notice anything that doesn't happen on their pocket screens.


If you can't figure out what to do, that doesn't mean you have an excuse to do nothing. Get organized and act. Stop sitting there waiting for a plan to come along that you can get on board with, just start *doing stuff now.


Being an earth dwelling human, this seems pretty bad. Aside from buying ammo or survival rations, what's something proactive that I can do? Is there an organization that is trying to rid the world of pesticides (assuming that's the cause)? If I opt to call my representatives, what am I calling in support of/against?

Over the last year, reading the news had made me more passive and worried. I want to dedicate a slice of time to doing something to solve the problem, but I'm not certain if there's anything pragmatic to be done against big areas of environmental concern like this, global warming, ocean acidity, and etc.


> I want to dedicate a slice of time to doing something to solve the problem

Eat less meat (huge environmental impact!), bike more, don't consume as much non-local food, etc.


I wanted to tack on here that even our agriculture has a huge environmental impact — nothing worse for biodiversity than how we’ve replaced animal habitats with fields of a single crop! And then pesticides etc.

I don’t know if it ever happen, but we really should support capture fisheries, fish farms, and captured game.

Properly Managed Captured Fisheries (Mostly more prosperous nations have well managed fisheries, outstanding fisheries would be in Alaska & New Zealand) allow us to extract protien we all need without destroying ecosystems. Same goes for captured game but that scales significantly worse.

Fish farms are in a unique position because unlike farming animals on land, it can be done without radically changing the part of the ocean the fish are farmed in.

I think recently there have been some problems with fish farms and antibiotic / illness spreading but I really think these can be overcome and that long term aquaculture would be the most environmentally conscious option. (In a similar position to electric cars today).


> Fish farms are in a unique position because unlike farming animals on land, it can be done without radically changing the part of the ocean the fish are farmed in.

Fish farms are a little like farming rabbits in packed, huge fenced in areas.

You get a lot of disease, use a lot of medicine and antibiotics - and get a lot of feces. And escaped, diseased rabbits that breed in the wild.

Fish farms on land are likely better - but at any rate, fish farms are far from being without environmental impact.


> we really should support capture fisheries, fish farms, and captured game

I guess if you HAVE to eat meat that is a better option, but we don't need it anymore. Its such an inefficient way to get calories and its not as nutritious as plant substitutes.


Are you serious? Most of the plant substitutes for meat are based off nutrient-devoid grains, soy, and corn. It's also not at all an inefficient way to get calories; fat packs the most calories per gram, and fat (especially saturated fat) is not easily available in plants unless you're making a concerted effort to eat avocados, olives, and coconuts. I'd rather eat a fatty steak and be satiated for hours, than have the same calories from quinoa (or some other 'healthy' grain) and be ravenous 2 hours later when my insulin levels drop.


You make a compelling point. If I wanted to support one of those companies by purchasing their products, what would I look for? Any chance salmon is among the fish that are well farmed?


Factory-farmed meat is bad for humans and bad for the environment, true, but any industrial-scale monoculture crop has huge negative impacts, and that includes vegetables too.

Better to avoid monocultures by buying organic/biodynamic, shopping at farmers' markets, CSA, growing your own food, etc. Eat less processed and make more from scratch. Better health, better for the environment, and you can still enjoy meat :)


I've long had a scifi vision of the future in which autonomous drones intelligently, with sustainability as a goal, hunt wild fish as a good way around the factory meat problem. Only slightly related, just wanted to share some techno-optimism.


Techno-Optimism nowadays includes Hunting Robots. What a time to be alive.


True, but it doesn't scale. Good luck if you live in a metro area.


How so? In San Francisco there are several local produce markets within walking distance of where I live. Whole Foods and Trader Joe's are pretty common major grocery chains here, and there are two weekly farmer's markets I can think of that are accessible by bike/transit.

When I visited Manhattan/Brooklyn recently I didn't get the sense that they were lacking in locally-sourced foods either. Main problem I can think of are food deserts, but those are more of an economic problem than scale. When I used to live in one in Baltimore though it was possible to find local food, it just took more effort.


this part specifically:

> growing your own food

I should have quoted that directly in my original comment.


If there was demand for it, every other apartment building rooftop could include a greenhouse.


you would need much more than a rooftop to feed a high rise apt building, no?


Correct, but a rooftop would put a sizeable dent in the building's need to bring in food.


    > don't consume as much non-local food
This is actually an unscientific myth. It's counterintuitive but it can be much better for the environment to eat non-local food:

http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2015/06/the_biggest_myt...


That article is missing point. The point of eating local food is that you eat what's in season and what's available in your area. Obviously if you live in Canada you won't be able to find 'local' Avocados, but the idea is you would forfeit eating Avocados in favor of eating whatever is locally produced, instead of shipping those Avocados from Mexico.


No, I believe you're missing the point.

What the article is asserting and what the science shows is that even if you have Avacados being grown literally next door the environmental impact of buying them locally is often higher than shipping them from abroad.

For example, the SGU podcast they link to [1] (around 55m:50s in) discusses that the net environmental impact (carbon emissions) of shipping beef to the UK from New Zealand is less than consuming UK beef in the UK. So if you're an environmentally conscious UK consumer you should be spending extra to buy NZ beef instead of buying locally produced beef.

This is because the carbon impact of the transportation generally hovers around 10%, which leaves the other 90% for actually producing the product "locally", and some locations on earth are vastly more efficient by every environmental metric in growing certain crops or raising certain livestock.

From the podcast: "An acre of land in Idaho can produce twice the amount of potatoes as an acre of land in Kansas".

Which leaves two reasons to buy locally.

Firstly you may be living in one of the places that's efficient at producing a given product, e.g. you'd buy local beef in New Zealand instead of importing it from the UK.

Secondly there are certain products that don't ship well, e.g. heirloom tomatoes. There you simply don't have the option of buying anything except local varieties.

1. http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu/514


> net environmental impact (carbon emissions)

“environmental impact” and “carbon emissions” are not the same thing; the latter is a very limited subset of the former.


Yes, but generally those will average out, and other than carbon emissions the environmental impact tends to get pretty well priced into the end product because it tends to be more land or resources that are required.

I put "carbon emissions" in parentheses there because the reason for this "buy local" fallacy to begin with is because people intuitively assume that it's the transportation of the good that makes all the difference, when the reality is that that's just 1/10 of the cost.

The environmental impact of the transportation is almost exclusively carbon emissions.


> other than carbon emissions the environmental impact tends to get pretty well priced into the end product because it tends to be more land or resources that are required.

No, most of the environmental impacts of agricultural productions besides carbon emissions are still externalities, usually time-shifted, that aren't priced into the product.


Why does everyone seem to forget the essential "have less kids" one ?

This is what puts me into the defeatist group. As long as people won't even put their reproductive urges in question (and rather discuss how flying is bad), how are we even supposed to achieve anything ? This should be one of the first logical moves, yet it's so frowned upon it's never brought up. Depressing.


Totally agree. Condoms people ! USE EM !


"Eat less meat" is not a good solution since industrialized monocrop agriculture has tons of problems on its own like topsoil erosion and air/water pollution. The problem doesn't lie in any one single food, but in commercial food production in general, be it livestock or agricultural. If you want to help against that, the best option would be to support sustainably raised meat and vegetables from local farms by going to farmers markets or eating out at farm-to-table restaurants. If possible, plant your own vegetables, raise your own chickens or hunt. Avoid buying from the big food producers, like Kraft, Tyson, PepsiCo or ConAgra


Buy organic too


People here argue things like that if whole industries, laws, etc don't change then an individual's actions don't matter.

I see it the opposite. Only if I change can I expect or hope anyone else will.

My list includes:

- Flying less

- Driving less

- Eating low on the food chain

- Avoiding packaged food

- Owning and acquiring less stuff

... things like that.

My life has never been better. I wish I had started this change decades earlier.


Not sure how much of a frequent flyer you'd have to be to make a conscious decision to fly less. I'm certainly not there.


Flying once a year will, for most people, form a significant percentage of their total CO2 footprint. So cutting that in half by flying once every two years would already be a big improvement.

Flying 5000 KM apparently produces approximately 1 ton of CO2. The 2010 rate average CO2 footprint per capita was about 7 tons a year, and the goal by 2050, if we mean to have a reasonable chance of keeping warming by 2100 to less than 2 degrees centigrade from pre-industrial levels, is a bit over 2 tons. So if you fly at all, making a conscious decision to fly less will help.[1]

Yes, the requirements to meet that goal of sub-2-degree warming by 2100 are pretty severe.

[1]http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/carbon-targets-for-your-footp...


I've been on a plane exactlt twice in my life. It's pretty easy not to fly.


And your right, individual action won't scale...

For the US you have a lot of work to do before you have a moderately decent working political system.


to me this implies you don't travel or go out much. so what do you do for fun then?


I don’t see where you get that implication. Perhaps they’re spending a month in France rather than taking three one-week trips. Perhaps they’re living closer to town so that they don’t drive as much to get to work and their local hacker club. There’s lots of ways you can reorganize your life to be less resource-intensive without meaningful sacrifice, especially if you’re starting from the immensely wasteful late-20th-century-middle-class lifestyle.


All you have to do is take on less flight in your life to make a huge impact. The carbon output per person of a round trip flight from NY to Phoenix is 806 pounds.

http://gscleanenergy.blogspot.com/2013/04/how-much-gas-does-...


It's one of the best decisions I've made. I have more adventure, culture, cuisine, and other values I used to get from travel, without the pollution and emissions.

I posted about it here -- https://www.inc.com/joshua-spodek/365-days-without-flying.ht..., although my views have continued to evolve since then -- and on my blog.


I haven't been in a plane myself in 4 years. I got months without getting in a car. I'm up to my ears in adventure.

But it's not enough, right? We're completely dependent on cheap sources of fossil fuels to drive our economy. How much carbon is released in the atmosphere from just me eating food?


Ah yes, life without flying must be so dull. Is that what you're implying? Seems rather silly.


> Only if I change can I expect or hope anyone else will

This makes no logical sense. Only if I fly to the moon can I ever expect anyone else too? Some things require collective action at the government level.


Singular persons influence people, ..., attitudes change and then governments react.


> Aside from buying ammo or survival rations, what's something proactive that I can do?

Yep, stop focusing on the movie-style end-of-the-world apocalypse, where it's just you and your guns versus the raiders. Instead of planning what you're going to do when it all turns to crap, do stuff now. In short, fix the world you're in, rather than planning for a world which really isn't going to happen.

Talking to politicians is the first thing you can do - if they don't hear the noise, they're never going to do anything about it, and they're the decision-makers. Change your behaviours as other commentators have stated. Talk to your friends so they at least have heard the issue.

But don't pretend that you're going to go off into the woods and survive like in a movie - if society ever did go that far, then you're fucked anyway - no doctors, no hospitals, no emergency services, no entertainment, no travel, so on and so forth. Few of us are actually comfortable with the idea of living permanently off the land (those survival rations won't last very long).


Go into crispr research or other biological engineering fields if you want to do something directly. Figure out how to make less toxic pesticides that are economically substitutable (break-even or only slightly more costly than existing ones) rather than demanding that they're banned entirely, or if you're satisfied those exist already, lobby for their use. I suspect that whatever preventable problems we face we're not going to unite as a big collective to prevent them, especially when incentives don't align, but a few teams will be able to engineer solutions when the problems become actualized. Instead of asking how do we prevent problems, ask how we can solve problems given that they occur.


I am going into crispr to make pesticide immune versions of all the bugs we currently have. Effect change where you can.


Wouldn't that eventually mean you starve a large portion of the population as crop yields shrink dramatically?


It's certainly a decent plot for a bond movie.

Pesticide resistant super bugs could probably breed and eat all our crops in no time.


Let Them Eat Bugs!


People are actually seriously proposing that. Very high in protein, and very efficient at converting feed to protein.

I'm not sure it will catch on fast....

More seriously, we need to be pursuing sustainable agricultural practices. I believe that means treating crop fields as the complex microbiomes that they should be, instead of highly-tilled, species-restricted biomes. Read up on how no-till and low-till farming practices change the soil communities of worms and microbes. It's huge. We need to move away from heavy reliance on pesticide and herbicide for the health of the soil and environment neighboring the fields, not to mention our own.

The thing is, we got to heavy chemical agriculture in part because of a drive to lower fuel consumption by making fewer passes over the field doing mechanical weed disruption. Of course, mechanical weed disruption is the kind of tillage that disrupts the soil biome, so we shouldn't go back, anyway, even if you could magically make diesel fuel cost $0. We need a new way forward to feed a hungry planet in a sustainable fashion.


>Eat bugs

Now deliciously enriched with 35% more of weedkillers


Basically, you're going to engineer new insects... I love it! I'm in! Can't wait to see the big chemical companies' faces when they see a poster on new breeds resistant to everything they have on the market or contemplating to put on the market.


I was thinking some combination of carpenter ant, a beetle and a mantis. It would nice if it had wings so it could spread faster, the ant and the mantis are intelligent. It would be nice if it could live off leavings of a 25-35 year old yuppie, so unused airtime minutes and a mixture of dried latte foam and eco-plastic.

I wonder if we could infuse it with some Octopus brain matter? Also, I'd like it to have the ability to remember across generations, but Octopus probably already do this.


I think supporting permaculture is a big step we can all take. Have a look at Ben Falk's YouTube videos for a quick intro, or Sepp Holzer. We need to move towards a form of agriculture which does active good for the planet. It's possible to do.

Edit: Also, a simple step: leave parts of your lawn unmowed for a full year. This gives insects and certain endangered birds much needed habitat in what is otherwise a wasteland of suburbian lawns.


It frustrates me that even though I am not in a HOA area, I cannot do this without getting letters from the city and fines. They will come mow my lawn for me and then charge me if I don't keep them mowed. Even my back yard which is almost 100% enclosed. I rent, otherwise I would build a wall right against my neighbors property so they wouldn't call the city on me for being able to see through a 5 foot gap into the back yard. I try to be considerate and keep the front and side clean but they even complained about there being too much wildlife back there (as if that was a bad thing). I usually have a whole bunny family living back there with birds and lots of bugs but eventually I have to mow it or have it mowed for me at my expense.


Where the heck do you live? I'm in a small town in the south east coast of the US. I'm pretty sure our city crew would get fired (or shot) here for trying to forcibly mow someone's yard without their consent.


A decent sized city in the south east, its a common complaint around here but other people have done more to fight it. Since I don't own I haven't really pushed it but if I did I think I would. My guess is that it all has to do with property values, if I built a nice garden in the front lawn and it looked great it would be fine. Letting it just grow up not so much which is why I limit it to the back yard but my uptight neighbors don't want to be next to wildlife.


I live in a large town in the southeast and that is indeed our county's policy: http://www.pinellascounty.org/code-enforcement/enforcement-c...

That said, "Florida friendly landscaping" (creating a yard that can adequately handle Florida's natural irrigation, which is not necessarily grass oriented) has been steadily growing in support. In fact, it's actually illegal for an HOA to prevent a Florida friendly landscape (https://www.volusia.org/core/fileparse.php/4163/urlt/HOAs.pd...), although in practice a lot of HOAs still enforce a "thou must have a large thirsty St. Augustine grass front lawn" code.


The key word is 'I rent'. Rental properties can be subject to more restrictions than owner-occupied properties and people who care enough to complain to the city (generally homeowners calling on rental properties) know when the laws of a jurisdiction is in their favor.

Where I live, the city has the power to abate nuisances, which involves notifying the property owner with a period of time given to bring the cited issue into compliance. If the property owner fails to correct the issue, city workers correct it and the property owner is billed an (outrageous) hourly rate, minimum 1 hour.


I'm not sure that it makes that much of a difference, the city doesn't seem to care who reads the letter or who pays the fine but it does affect how much I fight it and what I can do to get around it.


I wish there was a way to make it popular for people to let their yard grow wild and make it taboo to mow your lawn.


Ha! That's easy. In California, we call that "drought". A couple of years ago, having a green lawn was Extremely Incorrect in my neighborhood.


Yep, dead lawns and waist-high weeds. See it all the time. No nuisance enforcement. Although after the fast-spreading fires, I wonder if that will change?


That's how my backyard is and I love it. I clear some dead plant matter and don't barbecue things. I do have a solar stove that uses a parabolic reflector and prefer using it to the gas grill now.


Not that I've planned it for that reason, but my family has the documents to live in either Japan or Switzerland. Both seem reasonable bets to me, i.e. protected by geography and with a pretty resilient local population.

Have a read on the Bronze age collapse - when the global economy collapses, the main danger won't be environmental but due to human migration. In a functioning economy I'm very liberally minded towards freedom of movement (and in fact this lessens the danger I'm describing), but in a collapse, global inequality will come back to haunt the developed world in an apocalyptic fashion.


The developed world will use the first wave of immigration to build the walls that keep out the rest


Japan is way overpopulated. In the case that agriculture stops producing as much as it does now and food imports also dry up, Japan will be a very bad place to be. The country is mostly forest and mountain, arable land is rather scarce.


There's two main reasons way this doesn't scare me that much:

1) Japan's population is falling and I expect it to have fallen further, maybe to half or two thirds of current, until a global economical collapse.

2) There are ways to heavily increase the land use intensity with modern technology, which I'd expect to happen when the situation gets dicey. The Netherlands are a good example of how this can be done, essentially green houses everywhere. The actual bottleneck is how much energy you have, not the amount of land - Japan has lots of space in the sea for wind and solar energy, plus lots of unused geothermal.


I would be interested on more reading on these topics (collapse, human migration, global inequality, defense, survival etc.)


Two very expensive countries


Try to help figure out why it's happening. Uninformed activism is unhelpful, and can cause people to ignore informed activism.


It's happening b/c

- so many people don't understand statistics or science and

- some beekeepers in Germany wrote a paper. Here's one of the original papers: https://www.farmlandbirds.net/sites/default/files/Orbrioch%2...

The 75% decline number appears to be from two data points from a 220-acre plot.

- People panic, post it here and everywhere else, presuming that:

- proper scientific methodology was used and

- what applies to a 220-acre plot in the German hinterlands must apply to the whole world.


Uhh pesticides. Duh!


...also habitat loss, destruction of aspects of the overall food chain, Cline change, etc.


Yeah, I think my sarcasm didn't go over well here.


Yeah hold on while I take 5-10 years out to get a bio degree and publish research so I can start putting out papers saying it's too late and we've passed the point of no return, which will be denied and ignored by the people who are most likely to be causing the problem. Much better than possibly pissing anyone off.


The concern is not pissing people off, exactly. It's crying wolf until the relevant people stop listening. It's drowning out the voices of those who really did spend three decades studying the problem in order to come up with the right answer.

See how almost everyone's reply to the original post has a different recommendation? If they all worked hard to make those things happen, there would be a symphony of screams and no consensus and effective action. It's possible the right answer isn't even in there. It's possible the right answer even is, "Oops, wasn't a problem." When you act in uncertainty you make things worse.

Yes, getting the right answer is hard. It may take a good chunk of a lifetime. If you really want to change the world for the better, though, it's not a step you can skip. Saving the world over lunch while you're young is a fantasy.


By the way, I'm sorry for the snarky tone of my grandparent comment, at which point I was a bit tired and frustrated. But I do think that waiting for the 'right answer' is a bad strategy. Blind action is ineffective, but so is risk aversion.


But you are the relevant people. And just like in business, while it's important to research and plan effectively, if you never take any risks you never get any rewards and the opportunity slips away. Getting involved and taking action isn't going to drown out the voices of research scientists, because while we operate serially as individuals we operate in parallel as a species.

You're never going to persuade everyone. There are people who know how dirty fossil fuels are, how risky pollutants are, and so on. They know that research costs money and that preserving a healthy environment will require major changes - and they don't care. Maybe because they're old and bitter, maybe because they're selfish and figure they'll ride it out while the rest of the world goes to hell, maybe because they have a death wish. You're never going to convert that group, and in fact they'll oppose you every step of teh way because they're assholes. Too bad.

The large mass of uncommitted people in the middle want to be told what to do, and the best way to tell them is to lead by example. You don't have to rush out and start dismantling pipelines, but you do have to do something - whether that's raising awareness, embarrassing a political opponent in public, blocking the loading of chemicals you've decided are especially toxic, establish a weekly neighborhood cleanup crew or whatever.

Carrying on with your own life while waiting for something you can just vote or donate to is not working very well, is it? I don't mean that as a criticism of you, but of the system that purports to offer you environmental policy as a set of consumption choices that you can choose and feel good about. I've been doing recycling and conscious consumption and 1-1 advocacy for maybe 30 years. Those efforts are great, but we're not going to conserve our way out of the problem any more than you can become wealthy by saving a few $ a week. You can outsource it by making donations to organizations you approve of, but let's be honest here, unless you can throw large sums of money at a cause on a rolling basis you might as well be flinging quarters at an oncoming steamroller. Devoting some of your time and labor and investing a bit of your capital if you can is more likely to be effective, because people are primarily motivated by the example of others. And you need to think boldly, or you won't have any impact.

Of course people who are predisposed to study and able to do so should consider academic routes. But we already have lots of highly qualified scientists, while the head of the Environmental Protection Agency likes to do photo opportunities with coal miners to show he's not a creature of the evil science lobby. There is a political conflict here and it needs activists as well as researchers, because just having the correct answer isn't enough.


Doing something is unproductive, and often counterproductive. It is the battle cry of doctors who prescribe unnecessary antibiotics because they cannot hurt and are what patients want, and wind up contributing to the development of antibiotic resistant microbes. It is the philosophy of politicians who make laws for show without solving problems (and often creating problems in the process).

Do not do something. Do something effective.

To suppose that the insect biomass is reduced because of problems with the environment, and that doing good things for the environment will help fix it, is sloppy, superstitious thinking. Will recycling help? Dunno. Will establishing a neighborhood cleanup crew help? Seems unlikely. Will raising awareness help? Only if it serves to better identify the problem or uncover a real solution.

Back when leaded gasoline was poisoning everyone, no amount of recycling, environmental advocacy, neighborhood cleanup, embarrassing politicians, etc., would have helped. The problem had to be understood well enough that people could be persuaded to agree to act in concert to solve it specifically and at great cost. This takes time and study.

Nature is not a moral agent. It will not heal and be kind simply because we act piously toward it. We must understand problems in the specific and fix them in the specific. If you want to help with this insect biomass thing, begin by studying it. Is it really happening? Is it really a problem? What is the cause? Then ask what we can do. Then try to persuade people to do it.

You can't skip steps. It sucks that it takes time and effort, it sucks that you can't just solve everything overnight, but it is the only way to be an agent of effective positive change rather than an agent of chaos.

I am committed to acting vigorously on problems that I know are real, in ways that I am convinced are effective. There is plenty of that to go around!


All true, but the point I'm trying to make (poorly) is that there's more to life than truth-seeking. That's the function of science, but even if science hands you a definitive answer you still need to create the political will to implement it. And it's a fact that there are people who have economic interests in not fixing problems.

I don't care about insect biomass in particular. I care about it as a possibly-wrong indicator of general environmental degradation, of which we have numerous indicators. I also have a possibly-wrong model of the root causes of this and other problems.

You can't skip steps. It sucks that it takes time and effort, it sucks that you can't just solve everything overnight, but it is the only way to be an agent of effective positive change rather than an agent of chaos.

You can't solve everything overnight, but you can lose everything overnight while you're fretting over whether a problem exists or vacillating over its severity or dithering between a multiplicity of unpleasant solutions. An ounce of practice is worth a pound of theory, and my exhortations to act, which will sometimes lead to unproductive or ineffective results, are the product of decades of observation and thought.

I'm sorry that this doesn't lead to a neatly wrapped General Unified Theory of Sustainable Sociopolitical Development - because I too would love to have a verifiable roadmap to a brighter future - but chaos is preferable to predictably circling down into a drain. Overall, I have concluded that the world is getting shittier, that this trend is accelerating, and that the costs of your gradualist approach exceed the benefits.


personally, I've seen several circumstances where the costs of "doing something" are much higher than the benefits of deliberate study and taking correct action, even on a global scale.


This is what I've done in the last two years:

- Moved closer to work to minimize driving

- Take the train downtown (on nights out)

- Bike to work on occasion (it's a huge freaking hill)

- Bought programmable thermostats, LED bulbs, vent louvres. Dropped electric use 20%

- Eat organic (helps my IBS), cook at home, buy in bulk, freeze

- Started composting and recycling more. My city has good programs for such

- Ask for paper bags at grocery store, avoid plastics. Use glass storage containers, etc


- Bring a backpack to the grocery store,

Note, though this won't scale, you need to take political action to make a real change.


>> this won't scale

Yes it will. If everyone does it that's called scaling.


It helps, but not enough to solve the overarching problem.


Ugh, I hate people that bring their backpack to the grocery. It slows down the packing process a lot. Paper bags are a-okay with me.


Join an organization that's doing something to tackle the root of the problem. Socialist Alternative is where I ended up, and I think they're great, but any group that's got a good understanding of the forces shaping the world and has a job for you that you feel is worth doing. Not that that's easy to find through all the noise. I only stumbled across SA because they were speaking at a NoDAPL rally that I happened to go to during a period of relative hopelessness after the election of the orange one.


I would think donating to pro environmental lobbying groups. You be surprised how little large corporations spend on lobbying to influence politicians.


I do like my humour dry.


I'm surprised by what you're saying about the small amount destined to lobbying. Do you have numbers about this?


You have to dig a little, but the average cost for the votes against net neutrality cost about 16,000 per US congressman who voted against it.

http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=B


In aggregate, it looks like it's a few billion per year.

https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/


Being an earth dwelling human, this seems pretty bad. Aside from buying ammo or survival rations, what's something proactive that I can do?

Build a time machine, and instill this sense of dismay, terror, and dawning realization into everyone then.

Barring that, a series of technological miracles would help, but we needed them yesterday.

Don’t have kids.


https://deepgreenresistance.org/en/

Find or form a group in your area, consider dumping or downgrading your existing career which may well be meaningless anyway, and take up activism. At least you won't be subject to suffocating feelings of futility and guilt. Start tomorrow, it'll take you a year or two of work to figure out your new job so you'd better get busy with it.


DGR have some really problematic politics when it comes to certain things but there is definitely some good material in there in terms of strategy.

I'd recommend reading earth first! or black and green press for some better politics on a similar wavelength


Buy a piece of land (a prairie, woodland, marshland, whatever) and either let it sit without touching it, or take action to improve the ecosystem.


My grandfather did this. One day he set out to go for a walk in his wee forest, only to discover that all the trees had been stolen. That's pretty much the thing holding me back from buying a small forested plot.


>Over the last year, reading the news had made me more passive and worried.

Serious question: Did you only get serious with news reading in the last year or so?


Plant _local_ pollinating flowers and other plants that the insects rely upon, and encourage everyone you know that can do so to do the same.


Google Murray Bookchin


This defeatist attitude is terrible. There's so, so much you can personally do, even if you personally can't create change on a global scale a la Bill Gates and co.


They were asking for something proactive, to exit their defeatism. Perhaps you could suggest something.

I suppose reducing spending and food waste is one way an individual can help.

Or for specific problems like insects, if you have a lawn, don’t use pesticides, and cultivate areas of local plants. Grass only lawns aren’t very helpful for insects.


I had a teacher in high school who frequently cracked a joke that his “ugly” lawn was only ugly because he was prioritizing biodiversity over beauty.


The list of things an individual can do to lessen their environmental impact could fill a book, and it's up to the person to determine where they can best act. These ideas are easily googleable, which is why I suggest that changing the attitude from "hole up with food and guns" to "look for ways to be proactive".


Presumably this is similar here in the U.S.? In the 80's and 90's the fronts of our cars would get so encrusted with mashed bugs that it would take real scrubbing to get them off. I haven't had to do that in many years.


Article on the same topic from April referred to this as the "windshield phenomenon," you're definitely not the only one noticing it. I wasn't driving in the 80's and 90's, but I remember having a lot more bugs on the windshield as a passenger on family roadtrips.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/where-have-all-insect...

Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14323533


One wonders what percent of the "windshield effect" is a direct result of killing billions of bugs on the windshields of our cars, rather than a side effect of climate change or pesticides.


Wow, I just realized I had a similar observation. I used to do multiple 8-10 hours (one way) drives every year (2001-2014) in the north east; and bugs would pile up in the early years - not so much anymore.


I have heard this before. I’m not a climate change denier. Could it have anything to do with more aerodynamic car designs?


That's a good question but from my experience it's not the case. I live in France and 20 to 30 years ago, after hours driving on highways, it was quite common to have your car plastered with bugs.

Now it rarely happens.

And with the last 2 cars I've had, I know it's not an aerodynamic issue because one of my hobbies is to do track days.

I go to Michelin's wet track something like once a year and it's bugs' paradise: fields, grass all around and very humid because the track is wet so you can hydroplane easily. Bottom line is my car gets plastered there and we don't even drive that fast (something like 80/90 km/h or 50/55 mph).


I drive a jeep (basically a brick on wheels) and bugs are still awful.


The reason I asked this question was because I drive a Nissan Cube.


Do you see a lot of bugs?


Yes.


But were they as bad as they were?


I've had similar experience with bikes on a roof rack, where there's not a significant change in aerodynamics over the time.


If you really want that experience again you can go drive around the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in northern Minnesota in June. I had to stop at a gas station very 30 mins because I could literally not see through my wind shield.


Really? I was in the boundary waters in June and I certainly didn't have that problem driving. It wasn't until we were camping in the boundary waters that bugs became a problem.


Junebugs on your helmet visor. I don't understand people who ride without helmets. That's gotta hurt.


Vehicles are also a lot more aerodynamic. 5 years ago I had a Jeep Wrangler, which aerodynamically is like a box on wheels. In the summer, the grill and windshield got so many bugs on it that I worried about visibility problems. Now that I drive a Toyota Corolla, bugs are a nonissue.


Interesting, a user in another part of the thread also mentioned that he still has the bug problem with his Jeep. Seems like it could actually be a question of aerodynamics.


Since I see a lot of people here chiming in with similar anecdotes, I feel obligated to remind people that, even though we may think we notice a difference about something in our daily lives, it's really hard to attribute any actual meaning to this.


This is pretty alarming and suggests that soaking agricultural land in insecticides might be having some far-reaching side effects.


The primary suspected cause of this is a class of insecticides called neonicotinoids. These are not sprayed, but rather coated on seeds (which is arguably even more alarming). See: https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v521/n7550/full/nature...


While plausible, this study doesn't suggest that.

They mention it as a potential cause, but did no research to that effect and even state they made no attempt to measure such things.


Well, the intention of insecticides is to kill insects. All insects.

It's working, but perhaps a little too well?


The intention of insecticides is to kill the insects that prey on specific crops, not to kill every single insect there is. It's working better than they thought, causing it to have unintended consequences.


side effects?


Primary effects.


I live in Minneapolis. The city fumigates regularly in the summer by aircraft and ground-based methods both, which is why I can go running around the lakes in mid July and get maybe one mosquito bite. I think most US cities are like this.

It's a policy that should be scrapped in spite of the risk of West Nile and Lyme Disease.


They're not fumigating, they're spreading a bacteria that kills (only supposedly) mosquito larva.

http://www.mmcd.org/mosquito-control/larva-control/


So that's what they're doing? Are you sure that's all?


Every few weeks, many cities in Iowa drive trucks throughout the city fogging the neighborhoods with permethrin based pesticides. A popular choice is called MasterLine Kontrol 4-4.


> It's a policy that should be scrapped

Why? They're not spraying some broad-spectrum pesticide.


But it's a policy that eliminates a food source for some other animal. Especially when we have very effective and safe insect repellants already, like Picaridin and Lemon Eucalyptus.


Not about insects, but birds:

In the Pacific Northwest, on the coast of Olympic National Park, (Ruby Beach, Kalaloch, etc) 30 years ago (when I was a kid) the beaches were teaming with seagulls. On a given day you would see hundreds.

The last two years I've taken my own kids there, we are lucky to see even 1 seagull each day.

Maybe it's something else, heck maybe there was an open garbage pit 30 years ago and it's since been closed, but as discussed, most of these ecological changes (even human caused) are too slow for individual humans to detect.

So thought I'd share my own anecdote :P


What are the odds that honey bee colony collapse disorder isn't confined to just honey bees?


Too bad it wasn't the mosquitoes. Now when people shoot down ideas to eradicate them because "what about the species that eat them" I can just point out this 75 percent reduction in other flying insects...


I seem to recall that there are no actual species found that eat purely mosquitoes.


This kind of data should be collected on multiple places in the world. Given such findings we should thoroughly watch our ecosystems.

I have been in Japan during summer this year and (gotten used to the central-European ecosystems where the data for this paper has been collected) was surprised by the amount of insects and especially butterflies, which I had rarely seen for years. Is this just the climate (which also grows some giant insects) or could there be something different at play?


Just today we were discussing how there was almost zero insects splatters on the windshield or bonnet after an intercity travel. I remember it would get very dirty, at least almost always needed a wash.


> zero insects splatters on the windshield or bonnet after an intercity travel.

Still happens for me in Romania. In fact, I've just noticed it today after an 8-hour trip in my car through half of the country. Could be caused by the fact that we're not that "advanced" when it comes to use of insecticides.


My feeling: brace for systemic collapse.


I sometimes wonder what people were thinking or doing, in the days before a calamity. In Pompeii, in Lisbon, in Hiroshima, ... Unaware of what was about to happen to them. Just living their daily lives. I also sometimes wonder if future people will have reason to think of us in a similar way, when I hear of news like this, or the clathrate gun hypothesis.


>Hiroshima

Don’t know if you’ve ever read this, but here you go: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima


I had read some brief stories before (or seen them read out in a documentary) but this one I had not yet read. Thank you.


Depends on how widely you define system. So far in all previous mass extinctions the system resets to a new normal and repopulates the various gaps with new choices. The cynic in me would imagine the 'system' is working to kill off humanity so that it can re-balance.


> We will arrive at a moment of sufficent self-alienation where we can contemplate our own destruction [as a species] as in a static spectacle.

-- Walter Benjamin


The Happening much?


If you make that a specific prediction, I might like to bet against it, if you're interested.


Well, let's see, 80% of insects, 60% of birds, 75% of fish have disappeared in 30 years (a blink of an eye). Climate change is already bringing famine and chaos around the world. We have absolutely no credible alternative to fossil fuels. The financial system is in complete disarray. Economists proved GDP is strictly tied to energy consumption (that seems obvious) therefore, they indirectly proved that GDP growth is radically unsustainable on the long term (that made absolutely no doubt to anyone understanding physics, but hey, at least that's proven now). Several specialists announced not only "Peak Oil" (conventional oil peaked years ago, "all liquids" will peak in 2018/2019) but "Peak Everything" (even if we had some magical technology to solve any of the listed problems, we won't have the resources).

I deem probable that civilisation collapses before 2020, and almost certain before 2030. What's your bet?


I'd like to bet against civilization collapsing by January 1, 2020. Given how dire that scenario is, I see the problem ceejayoz pointed out where there might not be much value to money at that point. But maybe we can bet on a precursor, like a stock market crash. There are probably scenarios where the stock market crashes first, but there's still time to use money before civilizational collapse.

I think we can solve it like this: if the S&P 500 drops below 50% of today's value (which is 2,562, so the trigger number is 1281), I'll send you $100 immediately, which is hopefully enough time to use that money for buying survival supplies before everything collapses. If that hasn't happened by January 1, 2020, you donate $100 to GiveWell[1].

It's an imperfect measure - I might accidentally lose it due to a nuclear war, but you still might pointlessly win it in a world where the collapse happens extremely quickly, and have a worthless $100 if I'm even still alive and able to use PayPal. But maybe it's good enough?

Want to take that bet, or suggest something else?

[1] https://www.givewell.org/


Sounds reasonable to me :)


We're on! Can you email me at michael.keenan [at] gmail so we can be in touch?


2020 is 3 years away, Trump's tax cuts might give an unrecoverable financial crash by 2020.

But I'm not sure that's the end of civilization.. in terms of energy the EU goal is 20% renewable by 2020. Some countries are already at 40% of electricity.

There is a lot of work to do, but it's not game over yet.


Global civilisation collapse is unlikely to be a one-day event. It will be a gradual process over several years, for instance there would be a financial market crash, than an obligation market crash and a global debt crisis, then several of the G20 countries would fall into deep crisis like civil war or dictatorship, global trade will come to a halt, wars on resources would erupt at many points on the globe, then for instance the EU would cease to exist in fact but not in law (governments would pay lip service to it for years without actually complying to its policies) etc. We wouldn't be able to say for sure "this is it, today the civilisation is collapsing". However, at the end of a several years period, billions of people would have been killed by famine, epidemics, wars, etc.

Just like the fall of the Roman Empire has been dated to some more or less arbitrary date, but actually was a many years process, actually beginning a century or more before the point we date the "event"; and for people of the time, the Empire wasn't actually dead before several decades at least (and Justinian failure to capture back Rome).

So we date the "fall of Roman Empire" to september the 4th, 476; but it was in the making for a century, and wasn't a done deal for another century. Similarly, the "fall of the thermo-industrial civilisation" or "American Empire" or whatever else we'll call it will be set up to some day at some later date in the future.


Not the bravest of bets. How's @wazoox supposed to collect from you if the system collapses?


Bet on it happening in another continent? Bet on a precursor?


It's almost as if widespread use of pesticides is having a widespread effect on insects


The company I work for has a big portion of it's land devoted to nature meadow, and it is amazing how much more insects you see and hear, and I find it 9000x prettier than grass. We're letting most of our lawn at home get overtaken by a clover-like plant called Germander. People call it "lawn cancer", but I like it better than grass. More life in it, it gets pretty purple flowers in the spring, and it is hardy as hell.

My wife hates spiders in the house, but I love them - they take care of all the other critters I hate more, and they are interesting little buggers, especially the jumping spiders and wolf spiders.


Our flat is the same - I enjoy letting the mould grow on the wall, in its pretty, grey shapes. And every Summer, as the world turns in its natural course, there's the seasonal infestation of fruit flies around the bin. Nature's lovely.

Maybe our romantic adoration could be rediscovered if we admitted more things as being 'natural'? People, too, provide a kind of undergrowth, and their greater structures form some very fetching accretions.


Hyperbole, the first resort of trolls.


And in the meantime here we are, spending 200 kWh in energy per Bitcoin transaction.

Planet is doomed :(


why would you single out bitcoin? did you do any calculations as to how much material and human resources are spent^Wwasted maintaining fiat systems around the world? there are whole industries around designing, printing, securing and transporting money. banks, financial institutions, government institutions. all of that would be 90% obsolete if we switched to cryptocurrencies.

bitcoin is literally drop in the bucket.


This study appears to be an alarmist rehash of what was previously discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14323533

Here's one of the original papers: https://www.farmlandbirds.net/sites/default/files/Orbrioch%2...

The 75% decline number appears to be from two data points from a 220-acre plot. From that paper:

"What follows is a description of measured Insect-Biomasses from samples collected in the Orbroich Bruch Nature Reserve, near Krefeld, using Malaise Insect Traps. The results show that, in the same two areas, sampled in the years 1989 and 2013, there was a dramatic fall in the number of flying insects. Using the same traps, in the same areas, significant reductions of insect populations, of more than 75%, were found. Our data confirms, that in the areas studied, less than 25% of the original number of flying insects collected in 1989, were still present in 2013."

"The Orboicher Bruch, to the Northwest of Krefeld, is a designated Nature Reserve of around 100 hectares (220 acres). Due to the reserve’s relatively remote location and its rugged landscape, intensive farming came to the area only recently."

So alarmists are extrapolating from two data points (years 1989 and 2013) for a 220-hectare plot of German farmland to the entire world. I think that is a bit of a stretch, even for statistics.

since different bugs breed in different seasons, and numbers depend on the fruitfulness of previous generations, food supply, predation, disease, temperature and so on, this bug weight could vary considerably from year to year (or site to site) for any number of reasons. While one year cicadas thrive, the next year there may be none. Shocking, simply shocking!

BTW they're measuring the weight of dead bugs - not how many bugs or what species of bugs - just the weight of bugs. Actually they're not even measuring that, they're measuring the weight of dead bugs' soaked in 70-80% alcohol.

I could go on and on about controls in statistical experiments but I think you get the idea.

See the original HN posting for discussions pointers to the earlier papers.


To people that were driving 20 years ago and are now, it was pretty obvious without any statistics that something was wrong, for several years now. 25 years ago, I couldn't drive 500 km in summer without scraping off a thick crust of dead bugs on my windshield afterwards (it was even common to stop just for that). In the past few years, I've driven thousands of km across Europe in summer with barely a dead bug on my windows.


I made a road trip this year from Germany to France to Spain to Gibraltar and back (~8.000 km) and had at most one or two bugs on the windshields every couple of days. I am 28 and thought this is normal, but it's so obvious that it isn't.


Has traffic increased in the last 20-25 years? It has where I live. Even with the same bug population, more traffic means fewer bugs/car/trip. And cars today are more aerodynamic.


Insects got smarter and learned to avoid streets.


> So alarmists are extrapolating from two data points (years 1989 and 2013) for a 220-hectare plot of German farmland to the entire world.

Actually the study is couched in a lot of careful caveats and they _don't_ extrapolate to the rest of the world. I didn't see any extrapolation. And, if you read the actual article that you linked above, a decline of 2/3 from 1970 was measured in Scotland. That's corroborating evidence that ought to be carefully considered.

> Actually they're not even measuring that, they're measuring the weight of dead bugs' soaked in 70-80% alcohol.

Are you f'in serious? You don't even trust them to be able to properly factor out the weight of alcohol? That's not being critical, that's just disbelief.

> I could go on and on about controls in statistical experiments but I think you get the idea.

I think it's easy to throw out such statements on HN but I think you get the idea.


titzer sez: "Actually the study is couched in a lot of careful caveats and they _don't_ extrapolate to the rest of the world. I didn't see any extrapolation."

Others are using the article as support for far-fetched claims. AFAICT a 220-acre study in the hinterlands of Germany with two data points (two samples, one in 1989 and one in 2013) is causing worldwide headlines claiming a collapse of bug population:

https://www.google.com/search?&q=75%25+decline+over+27+years

titzer sez: " You don't even trust them to be able to properly factor out the weight of alcohol?"

You missed my point: My point was that they measure the weight of a mass of unclassified insects + alcohol + whatever else was in the trapping fluid and that they weren't presenting statistics based on insect count or insect species or insect age, health, etc. Beetles weight more than mosquitoes for example but we aren't being presented statistics for specific insect species/age/health/etc, we're being presented statistics for a mass of unclassified insects + absorbed alcohol + whatever else. Any gross measure of insect biomass is highly variable depending on bug species, population, location, predation, food supply, season, disease, etc. If you do your harvesting immediately after , say, the cicadas emerge, you'll get lots of insect biomass. Do it a six weeks later and the biomass will plummet precipitously. So you must design your experiments to take such possibilities into account.

titzer sez: "That's not being critical, that's just disbelief."

And that is a poor attempt at use of a broad brush to tar someone.

I _am_ skeptical of the studies, as any scientist should be. You may, like others, read confirmation from your car's front bumper, but I prefer experiments with proper controls and measurements when we're speaking of good science. And, of course, I am always wary of field experiments that may involve the use of ethyl (drinking) alcohol:

Hans: Sorry, Hauser, I yust panicked and ran. Does it hurt much? Hauser, Hauser, are you drunk???

Hauser: My hands are on fire. Zat's the last time I try to throw a hornets nest! Good thing we have a handy pain-killer available! Zis bug juice is hardly working though; zese stings are killing me! Pass me zat other bottle.

Hans: Scheiss, Hauser, you're drinking ze bugs from ze data collection!! Vat the hell we gonna use for data?

Hauser: Zis trip is a catastrophe! Scheiss! I know what! Ve can give the data to Schneider. He said he can prove anything with almost any data. Once he told me, Schneider told me, "ze less data, ze better!" He says no one pays attention to real statistics anymore.


I don't take this result at face value or consider it definitive, but it's one imperfect result among many other imperfect reports that all point in the same troubling direction.

Alarms have a very useful function: to alert you to impending danger. That's why it's useful to conduct fire drills and spend some time/money on tools and methods that you hope never to have to use, notwithstanding the cost of occasional false positives.

I've noticed that people who say 'oh you worry too much' are never around to help when things actually go wrong, so I pay increasingly little attention to drive-by naysayers.


Tech like Permaculture & Regenerative Agriculture utilize ecosystems & food webs to manage pests. Better to design natural processes to create more food than to manage natural processes by destroying them.

There's a saying, "You don't have a bug problem, you have a lack of (insert appropriate bug predator here) problem."



I’ve noticed a lot less bug splatter on windshields when I go on a long trip in the Midwest. Inm sure there’s research in this but I’m in a restaurant right now waiting for my group.

It has to be disconterning to see these kind of changes.

Edited: there’s more with linked articles elsewhere in the thread that I just saw.


I dislike most insects. So long as this doesn't impact humanity's ability to thrive on the planet I don't mind. Since we're doing just fine in the face of such significant losses in biomass I don't really worry.


I might be missing something here, but we’re only talking about measurments in Germany, right? It seems like there’s some conclusion-jumping in the comments that this is happening globally (whether or not it actually is).


> only talking about measurements in Germany, right?

Yes ...

> total insect biomass using Malaise traps, deployed over 27 years in 63 nature protection areas in Germany


I went to Disney World/NASA space center in Orlando a few years back.

One impression I got was: For a place with some many water around, there were no mosquito and extremely quiet- no bird noise and no cricket noise at all.


It's pot-boilerish, a good deal of the science (i.e. why the insects disappear) is bonkers, and the author's reputation is somewhat tarnished these days, but oh boy did it make an impression: I read Charles Pellegrino's Dust almost twenty years ago, and this talk of insect die-off still brings the terrifying plot to the front of my mind.

Also, for a 1998 novel, it had a pretty decent future scenario of people somewhere around now using all-powerfull 'pads' for their web and mail and video chats and general computing.


We move at the start of the year to a house in the country here in Scotland that is pretty much surrounded by farmland and I've been amazed at the amount of insect life in our garden - particularly the amount of bees and butterflies.

However, because the area round us is rather hilly it is all low intensity cattle and sheep rearing. It's probably at least 15 kms (mostly over sea) to the nearest arable farming - who are presumably the heaviest users of insecticides.


Sounds lovely, but what is the net connection like? (asking as someone who needs it for work)


20Mbps - which isn't nearly as fast as what we had in central Edinburgh but fast enough for my work and Netflix/iPlayer etc.

Mind you finding a house we liked with a decent internet connection was very difficult.

[Weirdly we did find a house in rural Perthshire that had 450Mbps - full BT FTTP - but we didn't like the house!]


Which is one of the reasons I don't understand a few "pro-science" folks that go against organic by equating things like anti-vaxxers to people that believe sustainable and organic farming are better for our health and for the planet as a whole.

Sure, people defend all kinds of things with stupid arguments, but just because stupid arguments may be used to argue for something doesn't mean that other arguments are not correct.


I'm extremely unqualified, but is it possible that the insects just learned to avoid the specific traps used to do the measurements over time?


I was thinking the same, but its unlikely to lead to a 75% decline. The ratio of trapped insects (or insects that even get within a few meters of the traps) to total insects must be incredibly incredibly small.


Not really. For the traps I've seen, a powerful fan pulls air from an intake pipe at a certain height above ground level through a fine steel mesh filter. You remove the filter after a certain time period, and weigh the mass of the collected insects. You can then count them, and separate by species etc. It's difficult to avoid being sucked in so it's very unlikely that learned avoidance plays any role here; it's simply sampling flying insects in the local vicinity.


I went down the Mekong River from China to Thailand in about 2006 and there were thousands of insects that would flock to the boat when it moored overnight. I repeated the trip in early 2016 and there were almost none. Deforestation and the replacement of virgin forest with rubber plantations appeared to be the main factor, but at a guess the use of pesticides was probably also to blame.


When I was a kid I used to play with ladybugs that where almost everywhere. Not anymore. Now the only thing that I see are spiders and wasps.


We are not having this problem in Colorado, USA. We've got so many butterflies this year, they're showing up on weather radar.

http://www.businessinsider.com/butterflies-appear-on-weather...


We need to do a better job as humans of respecting and embracing the ecosystems around us.


this thread is full of doom and gloom.

is there really no non-apocalyptic perspective on this? consider: any other "apex" predator in history never stopped to research and ponder on effects of him demolishing the ecosystem.

the fact that this makes rounds in media and grabs attention and creates social pressure gives at least a glimmer of hope that something will be done about it.

if it's not too late.


Edit: I see the study was conducted in Germany, but it has me wondering about the U.S. where I have (anecdotally) noticed a large decline as well.

Are there large enough areas of the country that you could control for areas that don't spray for mosquitos to see if the populations have also declined in those areas?

It wouldn't surprise me at all to find out that the spraying over the last 10 years to control the mosquito population due to the media induced West Nile panic followed by zika panic has contributed to this.


My understanding is that mosquito's make up a very small amount of the total insect biomass (happy to be corrected).

I'm wondering if there aren't environmental factors like the rise of plastics or other chemicals in the environment that are slowly degrading insect populations.


Well, it's not worth doing anything now. We can engineer them out of diamonds with boutique DNA later. Or something.


Not sure, I have been wondering ( Europe) why new bugs appear that I have never noticed before. Butterflies are less also


Either due to warming (pine beetle being the poster child of that), or invasive species (Asian tiger mosquito).


Seems like the site would freeze the entire browser on Firefox 57.0b9 in macOS 10.12.


Everyone is chiming in with anecdotes. Maybe they're all correct.

But I definitely remember fireflies being everywhere at my parents house and turning the sky into a shimmering display... and I rarely see more then a few fireflies at all these days.


Same. I don't know if it's the pesticides on the farm fields by my parents' house, or what. There used to be swarms of them, maybe 2-3 feet in diameter. Now just a hand full. It's been like that for over 20 years.

Same with gnats, but I don't get nostalgic about those.


Monsanto.


If this holds up, this would seem to be a hugely important result. I'm waiting for HN's biologists to weigh in.


HN biologists are likely to be far less qualified than the authors of this paper.

This is not the only study detailing this observation; several have been floating around for the past few years.


That's alarming, but it needs followup. There have been rather obvious changes in Europe since the end of Iron Curtain. Would be nice to see similar data for other continents.


All this pessismism in this thread, acting like everyone on the planet has a terminal illness.

Lol. Go outside. Read about the success of the endangered species program. Stop living in fear


I think I might have found a way to reverse this at the local level in an individual yard. The problem is that is illegal and I was basically told that I was a scumbag for doing this. You can read more about my native yard experiment here: http://opilionesman.blogspot.ca/2017/05/i-wanted-to-share-so...




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